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We present the second part of a detailed statistical study focussed on the effects of tidal interactions and minor mergers on the radial and vertical disk structure of spiral galaxies. In the first part we reported on the sample selection, observations, and applied disk models. In this paper the results are presented, based on disk parameters derived from a sample of 110 highly-inclined/edge-on galaxies. This sample consists of two subsamples of 49 interacting/merging and 61 non-interacting galaxies. Additionally, 41 of these galaxies were observed in the NIR. We find significant changes of the disk structure in vertical direction, resulting in ~1.5 times larger scale heights and thus vertical velocity dispersions. The radial disk structure, characterized by the cut-off radius and the scale length, shows no statistically significant changes. Thus, the ratio of radial to vertical scale parameters, h/z0, is ~1.7 times smaller for the sample of interacting/merging galaxies. The total lack of typical flat disk ratios (h/z0)>7 in the latter sample implies that vertical disk heating is most efficient for (extremely) thin disks. Statistically nearly all galactic disks in the sample (93%) possess non-isothermal vertical luminosity profiles like the sech (60%) and exp (33%) distribution, independent of the sample and passband investigated. This indicates that, in spite of tidal perturbations and disk thickening, the initial vertical distribution of disk stars is not destroyed by interactions or minor mergers.
This paper is the first part in our series on the influence of tidal interactions and minor mergers on the radial and vertical disk structure of spiral galaxies. We report on the sample selection, our observations, and data reduction. Surface photome
We investigate the influence of stellar migration caused by minor mergers (mass ratio from 1:70 to 1:8) on the radial distribution of chemical abundances in the disks of Milky Way-like galaxies during the last four Gyr. A GPU-based pure N-body tree-c
We analyse the phase-space structure of simulated thick discs that are the result of a significant merger between a disc galaxy and a satellite. Our main goal is to establish what would be the characteristic imprints of a merger origin for the Galact
We use hydrodynamic simulations of minor mergers of galaxies to investigate the nature of surface brightness excesses at large radii observed in some spiral galaxies: antitruncated stellar disks. We find that this process can produce the antitruncati
Multiple, sequential mergers are unavoidable in the hierarchical build-up picture of galaxies, in particular for the minor mergers that are frequent and highly likely to have occured several times for most present-day galaxies. However, the effect of