Cold stream stability during minor mergers

Abstract

We use high-resolution Eulerian simulations to study the stability of cold gas flows in a galaxy size dark matter halo (10^12 Msun) at redshift z=2. Our simulations show that a cold stream penetrating a hot gaseous halo is stable against thermal convection and Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. We then investigate the effect of a satellite orbiting the main halo in the plane of the stream. The satellite is able to perturb the stream and to inhibit cold gas accretion towards the center of the halo for 0.5 Gyr. However, if the supply of cold gas at large distances is kept constant, the cold stream is able to re-establish itself after 0.3 Gyr. We conclude that cold streams are very stable against a large variety of internal and external perturbations.