No Arabic abstract
We have obtained radial velocity measurements for 51 new globular clusters around the Sombrero galaxy. These measurements were obtained using spectroscopic observations from the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the Hydra spectrograph at WIYN. Combined with our own past measurements and velocity measurements obtained from the literature we have constructed a large database of radial velocities that contains a total of 360 confirmed globular clusters. Previous studies analyses of the kinematics and mass profile of the Sombrero globular cluster system have been constrained to the inner ~9 (~24 kpc or ~5 effective radii), but our new measurements have increased the radial coverage of the data, allowing us to determine the kinematic properties of M104 out to ~15 (~41 kpc or ~9 effective radii). We use our set of radial velocities to study the GC system kinematics and to determine the mass profile and V-band mass-to-light profile of the galaxy. We find that the V-band mass-to-light ratio increases from 4.5 at the center to a value of 20.9 at 41 kpc (~9 effective radii or 15), which implies that the dark matter halo extends to the edge of our available data set. We compare our mass profile at 20 kpc (~4 effective radii or ~7.4) to the mass computed from x-ray data and find good agreement. We also use our data to look for rotation in the globular cluster system as a whole, as well as in the red and blue subpopulations. We find no evidence for significant rotation in any of these samples.
As part of a chemo-dynamical survey of five nearby globular clusters with 2dF/AAOmega on the AAT, we have obtained kinematic information for the globular cluster NGC3201. Our new observations confirm the presence of a significant velocity gradient across the cluster which can almost entirely be explained by the high proper motion of the cluster. After subtracting the contribution of this perspective rotation, we found a remaining rotation signal with an amplitude of $sim1 km/s$ around a different axis to what we expect from the tidal tails and the potential escapers, suggesting that this rotation is internal and can be a remnant of its formation process. At the outer part, we found a rotational signal that is likely a result from potential escapers. The proper motion dispersion at large radii reported by Bianchini et al. has previously been attributed to dark matter. Here we show that the LOS dispersion between 0.5-1 Jacobi radius is lower, yet above the predictions from an N-body model of NGC3201 that we ran for this study. Based on the simulation, we find that potential escapers cannot fully explain the observed velocity dispersion. We also estimate the effect on the velocity dispersion of different amounts of stellar-mass black holes and unbound stars from the tidal tails with varying escape rates and find that these effects cannot explain the difference between the LOS dispersion and the N-body model. Given the recent discovery of tidal tail stars at large distances from the cluster, a dark matter halo is an unlikely explanation. We show that the effect of binary stars, which is not included in the N-body model, is important and can explain part of the difference in dispersion. We speculate that the remaining difference must be the result of effects not included in the N-body model, such as initial cluster rotation, velocity anisotropy and Galactic substructure.
We study the assembly of globular clusters (GCs) in 9 galaxy clusters using the cosmological simulation Illustris. GCs are tagged to individual galaxies at their infall time. The tidal removal of GCs from their galaxies and the distribution of the GCs within the cluster is later followed self-consistently by the simulation. The method relies on the simple assumption of a single power-law relation between halo mass (M_vir) and mass in GCs (M_GC) as found in observations. We find that the GCs specific frequency $S_N$ as a function of V-band magnitude naturally reproduces the observed U-shape, due to the combination of a power law M_GC-M_vir relation and the non-linear M_*-M_vir relation from the simulation. Additional scatter in the $S_N$ values are traced back to galaxies with early infall times due to the evolution in the M_*-M_vir relation with redshift. GCs that have been tidally removed from their galaxies form today the intra-cluster component from which about ~60% were brought in by galaxies that orbit today within the cluster potential. The remaining orphan GCs are contributed by satellite galaxies with a wide range of stellar masses that are fully tidally disrupted at z=0. This intra-cluster component is a good dynamical tracer of the dark matter potential. As a consequence of the accreted nature of most intra-cluster GCs, their orbits are fairly radial with a predicted orbital anisotropy beta >= 0.5. However, local tangential motions may appear as a consequence of localized substructure, providing a possible interpretation to the beta<0 values suggested in observations of M87.
Recent evidence of extremely metal-rich stars found in the Sombrero galaxy (M104) halo suggests that this galaxy has undergone a recent major merger with a relatively massive galaxy. In this paper, we present wide-field deep images of the M104 outskirts obtained with a 18-cm amateur telescope with the purpose of detecting any coherent tidal features from this possible major merger. Our new data, together with a model of the M104 inner halo and scattered light from stars around the field, allow us to trace for the first time the full path of the stream on both sides of the disk of the galaxy. We fully characterize the ring-like tidal structure and we confirm that this is the only observable coherent substructure in the inner halo region. This result is in agreement with the hypothesis that M104 was created by a wet major merger more than 3.5 Gyr ago that heated up the stellar population, blurring all old substructure. We generated a set of numerical models that reproduce the formation of the observed tidal structure. Our best fit model suggests the formation of this stream in the last 3 Gyr is independent of the wet major merger that created the M104 system. Therefore, the formation of the tidal stream can put a constraint on the time when the major merger occurred.
Globular clusters are collisional systems, meaning that the stars inside them interact on timescales much shorter than the age of the Universe. These frequent interactions transfer energy between stars and set up observable trends that tell the story of a clusters evolution. This contribution focuses on what we can learn by studying velocity anisotropy and energy equipartition in globular clusters with Hubble Space Telescope proper motions.
We present joint Suzaku and Chandra observations of MKW4. With a global temperature of 1.6 keV, MKW4 is one of the smallest galaxy groups that have been mapped in X-rays out to the virial radius. We measure its gas properties from its center to the virial radius in the north, east, and northeast directions. Its entropy profile follows a power-law of $propto r^{1.1}$ between R$_{500}$ and R$_{200}$ in all directions, as expected from the purely gravitational structure formation model. The well-behaved entropy profiles at the outskirts of MKW4 disfavor the presence of gas clumping or thermal non-equilibrium between ions and electrons in this system. We measure an enclosed baryon fraction of 11% at R$_{200}$, remarkably smaller than the cosmic baryon fraction of 15%. We note that the enclosed gas fractions at R$_{200}$ are systematically smaller for groups than for clusters from existing studies in the literature. The low baryon fraction of galaxy groups, such as MKW4, suggests that their shallower gravitational potential well may make them more vulnerable to baryon losses due to AGN feedback or galactic winds. We find that the azimuthal scatter of various gas properties at the outskirts of MKW4 is significantly lower than in other systems, suggesting that MKW4 is a spherically symmetric and highly relaxed system.