Star cluster survival and compressive tides in Antennae-like mergers
Gravitational tides are widely understood to strip and destroy galactic substructures. In the course of a galaxy merger, however, transient totally compressive tides may develop and prevent star-forming regions from dissolving after they condensed to form clusters of stars. We study the statistics of such compressive modes in an N-body model of the galaxy merger NGC 4038/39 (the Antennae) and show