Using 8 micron infrared images from the Spitzer telescope we determine the half-light radius (the radius that contains half of the total light) for a sample of 49 nearby merging and merged pairs of galaxies. We compared this with other properties of the galaxies including a) the mass of X-ray emitting hot gas Mx(gas), b) the star formation rate (SFR), c) the large scale environment the galaxies reside in, and d) the chemical composition of the galaxies. Our goal is to better understand the processes that produce hot gas in galaxies