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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
The stability of a galaxy against disruption when it encounters a point mass perturber has been investigated by numerical simulations. The merging process dominates in the case of encounters of binaries of comparable mass and disruption is important in cases where the components have different masses. The disruption of a galaxy occurs when its mean density is less than a critical density - the Roche density. The change in the energy falls steeply near the Roche density in the case of encounters in which the relative orbit of the perturber is circular.