GALAXIES AT THE EXTREMES: ULTRA-DIFFUSE GALAXIES IN THE VIRGO CLUSTER

By C. Mihos, P. Durrell, L. Ferrarese, J. Feldmeier, P. Cot'e, E. Peng, P. Harding, Chengze Liu, S. Gwyn, J. Cuillandre. 2015

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the discovery of three large ( R 29 ≳ ?> 1′) extremely low surface brightness (LSB; &mgr; V , 0 ≈ 27.0 ?> ) galaxies identified using our deep, wide-field imaging of the Virgo Cluster from the Burrell Schmidt telescope. Complementary data from the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey do not resolve red giant branch stars in these objects down to i = 24, yielding a lower distance limit of 2.5 Mpc. At the Virgo distance, these objects have half-light radii 3–10 kpc and luminosities L V ?> = 2–9 × 107 L ⊙ ?> . These galaxies are comparable in size but lower in surface brightness than the large ultradiffuse LSB galaxies recently identified in the Coma cluster, and are located well within Virgo’s virial radius; two are projected directly on the cluster core. One object appears to be a nucleated LSB in the process of being tidally stripped to form a new Virgo ultracompact dwarf galaxy. The others show no sign of tidal disruption, despite the fact that such objects should be most vulnerable to tidal destruction in the cluster environment. The relative proximity of Virgo makes these objects amenable to detailed studies of their structural properties and resolved stellar populations. They thus provide an important new window onto the connection between cluster environment and galaxy evolution at the extremes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d306dc89d0ff56ce6487c45df8b9722e1c47837

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Citations in the corpus

(Almost) Dark Galaxies in the ALFALFA Survey: Isolated H i-bearing Ultra-diffuse Galaxies (2017, background): “Some authors have also suggested restrictions in absolute magnitude, luminosity, or stellar mass (e.g., Mihos et al. 2015), explicitly limiting UDGs to dwarf mass stellar populations.”
CATALOG OF ULTRA-DIFFUSE GALAXIES IN THE COMA CLUSTERS FROM SUBARU IMAGING DATA (2016, background): “Recently, Mihos et al. (2015) found quite low SB (μ0 > 27 Vmag arcsec −2) galaxies in the Virgo cluster, and Boselli et al. (2016) noted that UDGs are easily detected in the Virgo cluster by the NGVS survey (Ferrarese et al. 2012).”
Ultra-diffuse galaxies outside clusters: clues to their formation and evolution (2016, background): “For this reason, these galaxies have been explored in galaxy clusters, where the distance to the UDGs is inferred by their proximity to the massive structure (e.g. Koda et al. 2015; Mihos et al. 2015; Muñoz et al. 2015; van der Burg et al. 2016).”
NIHAO - XI. Formation of ultra-diffuse galaxies by outflows (2016, background): “Red UDGs have since been found in the Virgo cluster (Mihos et al. 2015), with even lower SB than the Virgo LSBs discovered 30 years ago by Sandage & Binggeli (1984).”
Ultradiffuse galaxies: the high-spin tail of the abundant dwarf galaxy population (2016, background): “E-mail: nicola.amorisco@cfa.harvard.edu numbers also in the Virgo cluster (Mihos et al. 2015), the Fornax cluster (Muñoz et al. 2015), in 8 other clusters at redshift z = 0.044 − 0.063 (van der Burg et al. 2016, vdB16), and the number of detections in Coma have increased by at least an order of…”
Illuminating Low Surface Brightness Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “…Coma cluster has reignited the search for LSBGs, leading to the discovery of UDGs in environments ranging from dense galaxy clusters to the field (Mihos et al. 2015; Martı́nez-Delgado et al. 2016; Merritt et al. 2016; Román & Trujillo 2017b; van der Burg et al. 2017; Bellazzini et al. 2017;…”