Hα Tail, Intracluster H II Regions, and Star Formation: ESO 137-001 in Abell 3627

By Ming Sun, M. Donahue, G. Mark Voit. 2007

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the discovery of a 40 kpc Hα tail and at least 29 emission-line objects downstream of a star-forming galaxy, ESO 137-001, in the rich, nearby cluster A3627. The galaxy is known to possess a dramatic 70 kpc X-ray tail. The detected Hα tail coincides positionally with the X-ray tail. The Hα emission in the galaxy is sharply truncated on the front and the sides near the nucleus, indicating significant ram pressure stripping. ESO 137-001 is thus the first cluster late-type galaxy known unambiguously to have both an X-ray tail and an Hα tail. The emission-line objects are all distributed downstream of the galaxy, with projected distances of up to 39 kpc from the galaxy. From the analysis on the Hαoff frame and the estimate of the background emission-line objects, we conclude that it is very likely that all 29 emission-line objects are H II regions in A3627. The high surface number density and luminosities of these H II regions (up to 1040 ergs s-1) dwarf the previously known examples of isolated H II regions in clusters. We suggest that star formation may proceed in the stripped ISM in both the galactic halo and intracluster space. The total mass of formed stars in the stripped ISM of ESO 137-001 may approach several times 107 M☉. Therefore, stripping of the ISM not only contributes to the ICM, but also adds to the intracluster stellar light through subsequent star formation. The data also imply that ESO 137-001 is in an active stage of transformation accompanied by the buildup of a central bulge and depletion of the ISM.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8214a3069583ed7dfba4c1a614c7dc703ebc3ab0

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Citations in the corpus

Ram pressure stripping the hot gaseous haloes of galaxies in groups and clusters (2007, background): “…for the ram pressure stripping of galaxies in clusters has been provided by long (up to tens of kpc) tails of gas seen to be trailing behind several cluster galaxies (e.g., Sakelliou et al. 2005; Crowl et al. 2005; Vollmer et al. 2005; Sun & Vikhlinin 2005; Machacek et al. 2006; Sun et al. 2007a).”
The effect of ram pressure on the star formation, mass distribution and morphology of galaxies (2009, unknown): “Another striking observation is presented by Sun et al. (2007).”
Ultraviolet tails and trails in cluster galaxies: a sample of candidate gaseous stripping events in Coma (2010, background): “…examples of intra-cluster star formation have been observed previously in nearby and distant clusters (Gerhard et al. 2002; Corteseet al. 2004, 2007; Boquien et al. 2007; Sun et al. 2007; Reverte et al. 2007; Yoshida et al. 2008), and our Coma GSE sample shows that this process may be widespread.”
MUSE sneaks a peek at extreme ram-pressure stripping events - I. A kinematic study of the archetypal galaxy ESO137-001 (2014, methodology): “To date, these diagnostics have been limited to pointed radio observations (Jachym et al. 2014) or spectroscopy of selected HII regions (Sun et al. 2007, 2010).”
Star formation and AGN activity in SDSS cluster galaxies (2009, background): “2004; Sun & Vikhlinin 2005; Sun et al. 2007; Cortese et al. 2007); all these galaxies are observed at the cores of massive clustrs.”