No Arabic abstract
Interacting galaxies surrounded by HI tidal debris are ideal sites for the study of young clusters and tidal galaxy formation. The process that triggers star formation in the low-density environments outside galaxies is still an open question. New clusters and galaxies of tidal origin are expected to have high metallicities for their luminosities. Spectroscopy of such objects is, however, at the limit of what can be done with existing 8-10m class telescopes, which has prevented statistical studies of these objects. NGC2865 is an UV-bright merging elliptical galaxy with shells and extended HI tails. The regions observed in this work were previously detected using multi-slit imaging spectroscopy. We obtain new multislit spectroscopy of six young star-forming regions around NGC2865, to determine their redshifts and metallicities. The six emission-line regions are located 16-40 kpc from NGC2865 and they have similar redshifts. They have ages of ~10Myears and an average metallicity of 12+log(O/H) ~ 8.6, suggesting a tidal origin for the regions. It is noted that they coincide with an extended HI tail, which has projected density of N$_{HI}$ < 10$^{19}$ cm$^{-2}$, and displays a low surface brightness counterpart. These regions may represent the youngest of the three populations of star clusters already identified in NGC2865. The high, nearly-solar, oxygen abundances found for the six regions in the vicinity of NGC2865 suggest that they were formed by pre-enriched material from the parent galaxy, from gas removed during the last major merger. Given the mass and the location of the HII regions, we can speculate that these young star-forming regions are potential precursors of globular clusters that will be part of the halo of NGC2865 in the future. Our result supports the use of the multi-slit imaging spectroscopy as a useful tool for finding nearly-formed stellar systems around galaxies.
In this letter we construct a large sample of early-type galaxies with measured gas-phase metallicities from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Galaxy Zoo in order to investigate the origin of the gas that fuels their residual star formation. We use this sample to show that star forming elliptical galaxies have a substantially different gas-phase metallicity distribution from spiral galaxies, with ~7.4% having a very low gas-phase metallicity for their mass. These systems typically have fewer metals in the gas phase than they do in their stellar photospheres, which strongly suggests that the material fuelling their recent star formation was accreted from an external source. We use a chemical evolution model to show that the enrichment timescale for low-metallicity gas is very short, and thus that cosmological accretion and minor mergers are likely to supply the gas in >37% of star-forming ETGs, in good agreement with estimates derived from other independent techniques.
The Magellanic Clouds provide the only laboratory to study the effect of metallicity and galaxy mass on molecular gas and star formation at high (~20 pc) resolution. We use the dust emission from HERITAGE Herschel data to map the molecular gas in the Magellanic Clouds, avoiding the known biases of CO emission as a tracer of H$_{2}$. Using our dust-based molecular gas estimates, we find molecular gas depletion times of ~0.4 Gyr in the LMC and ~0.6 SMC at 1 kpc scales. These depletion times fall within the range found for normal disk galaxies, but are shorter than the average value, which could be due to recent bursts in star formation. We find no evidence for a strong intrinsic dependence of the molecular gas depletion time on metallicity. We study the relationship between gas and star formation rate across a range in size scales from 20 pc to ~1 kpc, including how the scatter in molecular gas depletion time changes with size scale, and discuss the physical mechanisms driving the relationships. We compare the metallicity-dependent star formation models of Ostriker, McKee, and Leroy (2010) and Krumholz (2013) to our observations and find that they both predict the trend in the data, suggesting that the inclusion of a diffuse neutral medium is important at lower metallicity.
We considered the regions of triggered star formation inside kpc-sized HI supershells in three dwarf galaxies: IC 1613, IC 2574 and Holmberg II. The ionized and neutral gas morphology and kinematics were studied based on our observations with scanning Fabry-Perot interferometer at the SAO RAS 6-m telescope and 21 cm archival data of THINGS and LITTLE THINGS surveys. The qualitative analysis of the observational data performed in order to highlight the two questions: why the star formation occurred very locally in the supershells, and how the ongoing star formation in HI supershells rims influence its evolution? During the investigation we discovered the phenomenon never observed before in galaxies IC 2574 and Holmberg II: we found faint giant (kpc-sized) ionized shells in H-alpha and [SII]6717,6731 lines inside the supergiant HI shells.
We present a detailed study of the Circinus Galaxy, investigating its star formation, dust and gas properties both in the inner and outer disk. To achieve this, we obtained high-resolution Spitzer mid-infrared images with the IRAC (3.6, 5.8, 4.5, 8.0 micron) and MIPS (24 and 70 micron) instruments and sensitive HI data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and the 64-m Parkes telescope. These were supplemented by CO maps from the Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope (SEST). Because Circinus is hidden behind the Galactic Plane, we demonstrate the careful removal of foreground stars as well as large- and small-scale Galactic emission from the Spitzer images. We derive a visual extinction of Av = 2.1 mag from the Spectral Energy Distribution of the Circinus Galaxy and total stellar and gas masses of 9.5 x 10^{10} Msun and 9 x 10^9 Msun, respectively. Using various wavelength calibrations, we find obscured global star formation rates between 3 and 8 Msun yr^{-1}. Star forming regions in the inner spiral arms of Circinus, which are rich in HI, are beautifully unveiled in the Spitzer 8 micron image. The latter is dominated by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission from heated interstellar dust. We find a good correlation between the 8 micron emission in the arms and regions of dense HI gas. The (PAH 8 micron) / 24 micron surface brightness ratio shows significant variations across the disk of Circinus.
We present VLA HI observations of JO206, a prototypical ram-pressure stripped galaxy in the GASP sample. This massive galaxy (M$_{ast} =$ 8.5 $times$ 10$^{10}$ M$_{odot}$) is located at a redshift of $z =$ 0.0513, near the centre of the low-mass galaxy cluster, IIZw108 ($sigma sim575$ km/s). JO206 is characterised by a long tail ($geq$90 kpc) of ionised gas stripped away by ram-pressure. We find a similarly long HI tail in the same direction as the ionised gas tail and measure a total HI mass of $3.2 times 10^{9}$ M$_{odot}$. This is about half the expected HI mass given the stellar mass and surface density of JO206. A total of $1.8 times 10^{9}$ M$_{odot}$ (60%) of the detected HI is in the gas stripped tail. An analysis of the star formation rate shows that the galaxy is forming more stars compared to galaxies with the same stellar and HI mass. On average we find a HI gas depletion time of $sim$0.5 Gyr which is about four times shorter than that of normal spiral galaxies. We performed a spatially resolved analysis of the relation between star formation rate density and gas density in the disc and tail of the galaxy at the resolution of our HI data. The star formation efficiency of the disc is about 10 times higher than that of the tail at fixed HI surface densities. Both the inner and outer parts of JO206 show an enhanced star formation compared to regions of similar HI surface density in field galaxies. The enhanced star formation is due to ram-pressure stripping during the galaxys first infall into the cluster.