Preservation of Cuspy Profiles in Disk Galaxy Mergers

Abstract

We carried out three self-consistent $N$-body simulations of galaxy mergers, with a cuspy dark matter profile, in order to study if the inner dark density slope is preserved in the remnants. In these simulations the progenitors include both a stellar disk and an intrinsic angular momentum for the halos, unlike previous similar studies. The mass-ratios of progenitor galaxies are about 1:1, 1:3 and 1:10. We find that the initial cuspy density profile of the dark halos is preserved in the remnants for the cases considered here.