Life Expectancy of the Large Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

We investigated the orbital evolution of sate]lite galaxies using numerical simulations. It has been long believed that the orbit suffers circularization due to the dynamical friction from the galactic halo during orbital decay. This circu]arization was confirmed by numerous simulations where dynamical friction is added as external force. However, some of the resent N-body simulations demonstrated that circu]arization is much slower than expected from approximate calculations. In this study we will show that (1) The discrepancy really exists, in other words, it is not any of error caused during numerical simulations