No Arabic abstract
We present a $Chandra$ study of the hot intragroup medium (hIGM) of the galaxy group NCG2563. The $Chandra$ mosaic observations, with a total exposure time of ~430 ks, allow the gas density to be detected beyond $R_{200}$ and the gas temperature out to 0.75 $R_{200}$. This represents the first observational measurement of the physical properties of a poor groups beyond $R_{500}$. By capitalizing on the exquisite spatial resolution of $Chandra$ that is capable to remove unrelated emission from point sources and substructures, we are able to radially constrain the inhomogeneities of gas (clumpiness), gas fraction, temperature and entropy distribution. Although there is some uncertainty in the measurements, we find evidences of gas clumping in the virialization region, with clumping factor of about 2 - 3 at $R_{200}$. The gas clumping-corrected gas fraction is significantly lower than the cosmological baryon budget. These results may indicate a larger impact of the gas inhomogeneities with respect to the prediction from hydrodynamic numerical simulations, and we discuss possible explanations for our findings.
Current models of galaxy formation predict that galaxy pairs of comparable magnitudes should become increasingly rare with decreasing luminosity. This seems at odds with the relatively high frequency of pairings among dwarf galaxies in the Local Group. We use literature data to show that ~30% of all satellites of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies brighter than M_V=-8 are found in likely physical pairs of comparable luminosity. Besides the previously recognised pairings of the Magellanic Clouds and of NGC 147/NGC 185, other candidate pairs include the Ursa Minor and Draco dwarf spheroidals, as well as the And I/And III satellites of M31. These pairs are much closer than expected by chance if the radial and angular distributions of satellites were uncorrelated; in addition, they have very similar line-of-sight velocities and luminosities that differ by less than three magnitudes. In contrast, the same criteria pair fewer than 4% of satellites in N-body/semi-analytic models that match the radial distribution and luminosity function of Local Group satellites. If confirmed in studies of larger samples, the high frequency of dwarf galaxy pairings may provide interesting clues to the formation of faint galaxies in the current cosmological paradigm.
If dark matter (DM) is composed by particles which are non-gravitationally coupled to ordinary matter, their annihilations or decays in cosmic structures can result in detectable radiation. We show that the most powerful technique to detect a particle DM signal outside the Local Group is to study the angular cross-correlation of non-gravitational signals with low-redshift gravitational probes. This method allows to enhance signal-to-noise from the regions of the Universe where the DM-induced emission is preferentially generated. We demonstrate the power of this approach by focusing on GeV-TeV DM and on the recent cross-correlation analysis between the 2MASS galaxy catalogue and the Fermi-LAT gamma-ray maps. We show that this technique is more sensitive than other extragalactic gamma-ray probes, such as the energy spectrum and angular autocorrelation of the extragalactic background, and emission from clusters of galaxies. Intriguingly, we find that the measured cross-correlation can be well fitted by a DM component, with thermal annihilation cross section and mass between 10 and 100 GeV, depending on the small-scale DM properties and gamma-ray production mechanism. This solicits further data collection and dedicated analyses.
Structure formation in the current Universe operates through the accretion of group-scale systems onto massive clusters. The detection and study of such accreting systems is crucial to understand the build-up of the most massive virialized structures we see today. We report the discovery with XMM-Newton of an irregular X-ray substructure in the outskirts of the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2142. The tip of the X-ray emission coincides with a concentration of galaxies. The bulk of the X-ray emission of this substructure appears to be lagging behind the galaxies and extends over a projected scale of at least 800 kpc. The temperature of the gas in this region is 1.4 keV, which is a factor of ~4 lower than the surrounding medium and is typical of the virialized plasma of a galaxy group with a mass of a few 10^13M_sun. For this reason, we interpret this structure as a galaxy group in the process of being accreted onto the main dark-matter halo. The X-ray structure trailing behind the group is due to gas stripped from its original dark-matter halo as it moves through the intracluster medium (ICM). This is the longest X-ray trail reported to date. For an infall velocity of ~1,200 km s-1 we estimate that the stripped gas has been surviving in the presence of the hot ICM for at least 600 Myr, which exceeds the Spitzer conduction timescale in the medium by a factor of >~400. Such a strong suppression of conductivity is likely related to a tangled magnetic field with small coherence length and to plasma microinstabilities. The long survival time of the low-entropy intragroup medium suggests that the infalling material can eventually settle within the core of the main cluster.
Based on galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and subhalos in the corresponding reconstructed region from the constrained simulation of ELUCID, we study the alignment of central galaxies relative to their host groups in the group catalog, as well as the alignment relative to the corresponding subhalos in the ELUCID simulation. Galaxies in observation are matched to dark matter subhalos in the ELUCID simulation using a novel neighborhood abundance matching method. In observation, the major axes of galaxies are found to be preferentially aligned to the major axes of their host groups. There is a color dependence of galaxy-group alignment that red centrals have a stronger alignment along the major axes of their host groups than blue centrals. Combining galaxies in observation and subhalos in the ELUCID simulation, we also find that central galaxies have their major axes to be aligned to the major axes of their corresponding subhalos in the ELUCID simulation. We find that the galaxy-group and galaxy-subhalo alignment signals are stronger for galaxies in more massive halos. We find that the alignments between main subhalos and the SDSS matched subhalo systems in simulation are slightly stronger than the galaxy-group alignments in observation.
We present a series of hundreds of collisionless simulations of galaxy group mergers. These simulations are designed to test whether the properties of elliptical galaxies - including the key fundamental plane scaling relation, morphology and kinematics - can be simultaneously reproduced by dry multiple mergers in galaxy groups. Preliminary results indicate that galaxy group mergers can produce elliptical remnants lying on a tilted fundamental plane, even without a central dissipational component from a starburst. This suggests that multiple mergers in groups are an alternate avenue for the formation of elliptical galaxies which could well dominate for luminous ellipticals.