Can dry merging explain the size evolution of early-type galaxies?
  The characteristic size of early-type galaxies (ETGs) of given stellar mass
is observed to increase significantly with cosmic time, from redshift z>2 to
the present. A popular explanation for this size evolution is that ETGs grow
through dissipationless ("dry") mergers, thus becoming less compact. Combining
N-body simulations with up-to-date scaling relations of local ETGs, we show
that such an explanation is problematic, because dry mergers do not decrease
the galaxy stellar-mass surface-density enough to explain the observed size
evolution, and also introduce substantial scatter in the scaling relations.
Based on our set of simulations, we estimate that major and minor dry mergers
increase half-light radius and projected velocity dispersion with stellar mass
(M) as M^(1.09+/-0.29) and M^(0.07+/-0.11), respectively. This implies that: 1)
if the high-z ETGs are indeed as dense as estimated, they cannot evolve into
present-day ETGs via dry mergers; 2) present-day ETGs cannot have assembled
more than ~45% of their stellar mass via dry mergers. Alternatively, dry
mergers could be reconciled with the observations if there was extreme fine
tuning between merger history and galaxy properties, at variance with our
assumptions. Full cosmological simulations will be needed to evaluate whether
this fine-tuned solution is acceptable.
