Simulations of collision and sloshing in the galaxy group NGC 5098/5096

ABSTRACT The study of galaxy groups is essential to understanding the evolutionary history of large-scale structures in the Universe. These dense environments have a significant impact on galaxy evolution, influencing their gas content, morphology, and star formation activity. In this work we analyse in detail the system NGC 5098$/$5096 composed of two galaxy groups. We performed hydrodynamical N-body simulations of a galaxy group collision aimed at reproducing the gas sloshing and surface brightness distribution observed in X-ray data. We conducted a detailed X-ray analysis and generated mock image Chandra observations from our simulations. The resulting corrected mock image surface brightness profiles show good agreement with the observed data. The relative line-of-sight velocity between NGC 5098 and NGC 5096 is $v_{\mathrm{los}} = 700$ km s$^{-1}$, with a projected separation of $d_{\mathrm{proj}} = 155$ kpc, suggesting that the collision occurs nearly in the line of sight. Our simulations were performed with an inclination angle of $80^\circ$ in order to reproduce the dynamical constraints. We also find a correlation between the dark matter and intragroup light distributions when comparing the residual dark matter map with the intragroup light morphology. Our best-fitting model is consistent with these observational constraints and provides a plausible dynamical scenario for the current state of the NGC 5098 group interaction with NGC 5096.