Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

THE ORIGIN OF NEUTRAL HYDROGEN CLOUDS IN NEARBY GALAXY GROUPS: EXPLORING THE RANGE OF GALAXY INTERACTIONS

2011; Institute of Physics; Volume: 142; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1088/0004-6256/142/4/137

1538-3881

Katie M. Chynoweth, Kelly Holley‐Bockelmann, Emil Polisensky, G. I. Langston,

Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena

We combine high-resolution N-body simulations with deep observations of neutral hydrogen (H i) in nearby galaxy groups in order to explore two well-known theories of H i cloud formation: H i stripping by galaxy interactions and dark-matter minihalos with embedded H i gas. This paper presents new data from three galaxy groups—Canes Venatici I, NGC 672, and NGC 45—and assembles data from our previous galaxy group campaign to generate a rich H i cloud archive to compare to our simulated data. We find no H i clouds in the Canes Venatici I, NGC 672, or NGC 45 galaxy groups. We conclude that H i clouds in our detection space are most likely to be generated through recent, strong galaxy interactions. We find no evidence of H i clouds associated with dark-matter halos above MH i ∼ 106 M☉, within ±700 km s−1 of galaxies, and within 50 kpc projected distance of galaxies.