PHENOMENOLOGICAL CLUES IN SIMULATED GALACTIC MERGERS

In recent studies of Barnes (1992) and Hernquist (1992, 1994) and with the developments of efficient N-body algorithms, such as the TREECODE (Barnes and Hut, 1986), the merging event has been studied in details . According to Hernquist (1993) the final outcome of this process is t hat most of the residual spin resides in the 50% of the material less bound to the remnant. Therefore the merger hypothesis can be tested by searching for fields of rotation mainly confined to the outer envelop es of elliptical galaxies. Aim of this paper is to make more precise t he types of phenomenological clues which could better identify a merge r.