Dust Streamers in the Virgo Galaxy M86 from Ram Pressure Stripping
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Astronomical Journal, August 2000, in press Dust Streamers in the Virgo Galaxy M86 from Ram Pressure Stripping of its Companion VCC 882 Debra Meloy Elmegreen1, Bruce G. Elmegreen2, Frederick R. Chromey1, Michael S. Fine1,3 ABSTRACT The giant elliptical galaxy M86 in Virgo has a ∼ 28 kpc long dust trail inside its optical halo that points toward the nucleated dwarf elliptical galaxy, VCC 882. The trail seems to be stripped material from the dwarf. Extinction measurements suggest that the ratio of the total gas mass in the trail to the blue luminosity of the dwarf is about unity, which is comparable to such ratios in dwarf irregular galaxies. The ram pressure experienced by the dwarf galaxy in the hot gaseous halo of M86 was comparable to the internal gravitational binding energy density of the presumed former gas disk in VCC 882. Published numerical models of this case are consistent with the overall trail-like morphology observed here. Three concentrations in the trail may be evidence for the predicted periodicity of the mass loss. The evaporation time of the trail is comparable to the trail age obtained from the relative speed of the galaxies and the trail length. Thus the trail could be continuously formed from stripped replenished gas if the VCC 882 orbit is bound. However, the high gas mass and the low expected replenishment rate suggest that this is only the first stripping event. Implications for the origin of nucleated dwarf ellipticals arXiv:astro-ph/0005243v1 11 May 2000 are briefly discussed. Subject headings: galaxies: interactions — galaxies: individual (M86) — galaxies: kinematics and dynamics — galaxies: clusters 1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604; e–mail: [email protected], [email protected] 2IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598; e–mail: [email protected] 3Department of Physics and Astronomy, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, 13346 e–mail: msfi[email protected] –2– 1. Introduction M86 (NGC 4406) is a bright elliptical (E3/S0) galaxy located in the Virgo Cluster at a distance of ∼ 18.3 Mpc (Capaccioli et al. 1990). It has a redshift of −227 km s−1 (Binggeli et al. 1985), while the mean heliocentric velocity of the cluster as a whole is 1050 km s−1 (Binggeli et al. 1993). M86 is thought to be on an orbit passing through the core of the cluster approximately every 5 billion years (Forman et al. 1979). It is an X-ray object and appears to be a weak radio source (Laing et al. 1983; Fabbiano et al. 1992; Rangarajan et al. 1995). A plume of X-ray, HI, and infrared emission from M86 suggests that its interstellar medium was swept back by the ram pressure from its motion through the intracluster medium (Forman et al. 1979; Fabian, Schwarz, & Forman 1980; Takeda, Nulsen, & Fabian 1984; Bregman & Roberts 1990; Knapp et al. 1989; White et al. 1991). There is also an optical asymmetry to M86 that gives it a slightly enhanced emission along the plume (Nulsen & Carter 1987). Here we discuss a nucleated dwarf elliptical galaxy, VCC 882 (NGC 4406B; Binggeli et al. 1985), that lies just to the northeast of M86, inside its projected stellar halo. Deep CCD images show a 28 kpc long dust trail inside M86 that appears to follow VCC 882 in its orbit. This trail is possibly the result of ram pressure stripping of gas originally inside VCC 882 that was removed by the high pressure of its motion through the hot gaseous halo of M86. The gas mass obtained from the extinction in the trail is consistent with this former connection to VCC 882. Other evidence for an interaction between M86 and VCC 882 could be an isophotal twist in the central 8 to 80 arcsec of M86 (Bender & Mollenhoff 1987), and the asymmetric outer isophotes of M86 (Nulsen & Carter 1987). Gas stripping is pervasive within this core region of the Virgo cluster. Three spirals are close to the M86/VCC 882 pair in projection: NGC 4438, NGC 4388, and NGC 4402. There is also a nearby dwarf galaxy, IC 3355. The spirals have been severely stripped of their outer HI disks (Warmels 1986; Hoffman, Helou, & Salpeter, 1988; Cayatte et al. 1990), but the dwarf looks normal. The peculiar negative velocity of M86 is also shared by NGC 4402, NGC 4438, and IC 3355, as if at least some of these galaxies are comoving like a group through the Virgo cluster (Kotanyi & Ekers 1983). Detailed studies of one of these galaxies, NGC 4438, suggest that ram pressure from its motion through the Virgo intracluster medium has visibly distorted its outer disk (Arp 1966), pushing the gas and star formation off the normal plane, and producing a short diffuse trail of radio continuum and X-ray emission (Kotanyi & Ekers 1983; Kotanyi, van Gorkom & Ekers 1983). A second galaxy in this group, NGC 4388, has been studied by Pogge (1988), Petitjean & Durret (1993) and Veilleux et al. (1999), with mixed results on a stripped origin for extraplanar material. The spiral galaxy NGC 4569, at an equal distance from M87 but on the eastern –3– side, has a negative velocity too, along with an anemic classification (van den Bergh 1976) and depletion in HI (Cayatte et al. 1990). Another dwarf galaxy, IC 3475, is closer in projection to M87 than IC 3355 and is highly stripped of HI (Vigroux et al. 1986), while another anemic spiral, NGC 4548, is about twice as far from M87 as these others and has a distorted outer HI disk (Vollmer et al. 1999). Ram pressure seems to have stripped the Virgo spiral NGC 4694 also. This galaxy is far to the east of the core region in Virgo. It has a 36 kpc long trail of HI streaming off to the west, with a linear velocity gradient along the trail that smoothly connects it with the galaxy (van Driel & van Woerden 1989). A very faint dwarf galaxy is also in the trail, where the HI column density peaks. All of these cases suggest stripping from the motion of a galaxy through the hot, low-density, intracluster medium inside Virgo. The case discussed here differs because VCC 882 was apparently stripped by its motion through the much denser hot gas associated with the elliptical galaxy M86. Its relative speed is just as large as in the other cases, exceeding 1000 km s−1, but the ram pressure it felt must have been much larger because of the higher ambient density. A similar case is the Virgo dwarf galaxy UGC 7636, which was apparently stripped as it moved through the giant elliptical, NGC 4472. The evidence for this is: a gas cloud to the side of UGC 7636 (Sancisi, Thonnard & Ekers 1987) that has the right mass to have been formerly part of UGC 7636 (Patterson & Thuan 1992; Irwin & Sarazin 1996); a 30 kpc long optical trail of luminous debris adjacent to the cloud and the dwarf (McNamara et al. 1994); absorption of the elliptical galaxy X-ray radiation by the HI cloud (Irwin & Sarazin 1996), and an oxygen abundance in an HII region of the cloud that is consistent with the abundance expected for UGC 7636 (Lee et al. 2000). Previous photometric studies of Virgo cluster galaxies were made by Binggeli et al. (1985, 1993), Bender & Mollenhoff (1987), and Caon et al. (1994). Katsiyannis et al. (1998) co-added thirteen Schmidt exposures to produce a deep R-band image of the Virgo southeast region, from which they studied extended and overlapping halos. The dust trail discussed here did not appear in these other images. 2. Observations and Data Reduction We obtained 92 images in B, V, and I over an approximately 1 square degree field in the southeast center of the Virgo Cluster using the Burrell Schmidt 0.6-m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory on 17-22 March 1999. The plate scale is 1.6 arcsec per pixel, –4– or about 142 pc per pixel at the assumed distance of 18.3 Mpc. The images were reduced using standard IRAF procedures. Flat fields were made from global sky flats taken over the entire observing run. The images were mosaicked to produce combined images with total exposure times of approximately 6.5 hours in each band. Figures 1a and 1b show a mosaic of the central square degree of the images in B band. The left-hand image is low-contrast, showing the giant ellipticals M84 and M86 as well as the small companion VCC 882, which is normally lost in the bright light of M86. The right-hand image is shown with high contrast to emphasize the outer extents of the large galaxies. Enhanced images of M86 are in Figure 2. The top left frame shows the logarithm of the intensity in B band with the angular scale indicated. Dark dust features are labeled. Feature A is 2.05 arcmin east of center, and Feature B is 3.7 arcmin southeast of center, midway between two bright foreground stars. These features are more prominent in the other enhanced images. In the top right, which is a (B-I) color map, Feature A has a fork at its mid-point and a faint extension, marked C, towards VCC 882. The lower left frame is an unsharp-masked image, made by smoothing the original with a Gaussian filter 5 pixels wide and subtracting this from the original. Most of the stars have been removed from this image by replacing the corresponding pixels with the average surrounding background. A star at the top of the eastern dust feature remains, as well as another due west of the center of M86 and one near VCC 882.