The ATLAS3D project - XIII. Mass and morphology of H I in early-type galaxies as a function of environment

By P. Serra, T. Oosterloo, R. Morganti, K. Alatalo, L. Blitz, M. Bois, Frédéric Bournaud, M. Bureau, M. Cappellari, A. Crocker and 16 more. 2011

328 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the ATLAS3D H i survey of a volume-limited, complete sample of 166 nearby early-type galaxies (ETGs) brighter than MK=-21.5. The survey is mostly based on data taken with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, which enables us to detect H i down to 5 x 1065 x 107 M? within the survey volume. We detect similar to 40 per cent of all ETGs outside the Virgo galaxy cluster and similar to 10 per cent of all ETGs inside it. This demonstrates that it is common for non-cluster ETGs to host H i. The morphology of the detected gas varies in a continuous way from regular, settled H i discs and rings to unsettled gas distributions (including tidal or accretion tails) and systems of clouds scattered around the galaxy. The majority of the detections consist of H i discs or rings (1/4 of all ETGs outside Virgo) so that if H i is detected in an ETG it is most likely distributed on a settled configuration. These systems come in two main types: small discs [ M?], which are confined within the stellar body and share the same kinematics of the stars; and large discs/rings [M(H i) up to 5 x 109 M?], which extend to tens of kpc from the host galaxy and are in half of the cases kinematically decoupled from the stars. Neutral hydrogen seems to provide material for star formation in ETGs. Galaxies containing H i within similar to 1Re exhibit signatures of on-going star formation in similar to 70 per cent of the cases, approximately five times more frequently than galaxies without central H i. The interstellar medium (ISM) in the centre of these galaxies is dominated by molecular gas, and in ETGs with a small gas disc the conversion of H i into H2 is as efficient as in spirals. The ETG H i mass function is characterized by M*similar to 2 x 109 M? and by a slope a similar to-0.7. Compared to spirals, ETGs host much less H i as a family. However, a significant fraction of all ETGs are as H i-rich as spiral galaxies. The main difference between ETGs and spirals is that the former lack the high-column-density H i typical of the bright stellar disc of the latter. The ETG H i properties vary with environment density in a more continuous way than suggested by the known Virgo versus non-Virgo dichotomy. We find an envelope of decreasing M(H i) and M(H i)/LK with increasing environment density. The gas-richest galaxies live in the poorest environments (as found also with CO observations), where the detection rate of star formation signatures is higher. Galaxies in the centre of Virgo have the lowest H i content, while galaxies at the outskirts of Virgo represent a transition region and can contain significant amounts of H i, indicating that at least a fraction of them has joined the cluster only recently after pre-processing in groups. Finally, we find an H i morphologydensity relation such that at low environment density (measured on a local scale) the detected H i is mostly distributed on large, regular discs and rings, while more disturbed H i morphologies dominate environment densities typical of rich groups. This confirms the importance of processes occurring on a galaxy-group scale for the evolution of ETGs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. M. Cappellari
2. T. Naab
3. P. Hopkins
4. M. Sarzi
5. L. Hernquist
6. Roger Davies
7. Frédéric Bournaud
8. Eric Emsellem

In Instrumentation

1. M. Cappellari
2. T. Naab
3. P. Hopkins
4. M. Sarzi
5. Eric Emsellem
6. M. Bureau
7. Roger Davies
8. D. Krajnovi'c

Citations in the corpus

• Cold gas stripping in satellite galaxies: from pairs to clusters (2016, background): “…are adversely affected in the highest density environments such as galaxy clusters (Giovanelli & Haynes 1985; Chung et al. 2009; Cortese et al. 2011; Serra et al. 2012), and that gas processing begins to occur within the group environment (Kilborn et al. 2009; Rasmussen et al. 2012; Catinella et…”
• The ATLAS3D Project – XXVIII. Dynamically driven star formation suppression in early-type galaxies (2014, methodology): “…& Gouguenheim 1977; Knapp, Turner & Cunniffe 1985; Morganti et al. 2006; di Serego Alighieri et al. 2007; Grossiet al. 2009; Oosterloo et al. 2010; Serra et al. 2012), dust in≈60% (Colbert, Mulchaey & Zabludoff 2001; Smith et al. 2012; Agius et al. 2013), and molecular gas in 22% (Combes, Young…”
• THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE GALAXY POPULATION DETECTED BY ALFALFA (2012, methodology): “Deep HI synthesis imaging of the SAURON and ATLAS3D samples of earlytype galaxies shows that HI is commonly detected in galaxies which do not reside in cluster cores (e.g., Oosterloo et al. 2010; Serra et al. 2012).”
• Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “More massive early-type galaxies typically have significantly lower cold gas fractions, although they are not devoid of cold gas, contrary to the traditional picture (Catinella et al. 2010, Saintonge et al. 2011, Serra et al. 2012, Young et al. 2011).”
• SPARC: MASS MODELS FOR 175 DISK GALAXIES WITH SPITZER PHOTOMETRY AND ACCURATE ROTATION CURVES (2016, background): “Recent surveys, however, show that several early-type galaxies in the group and field environments possess an outer low-density H I disk (Serra et al. 2012), which can be used for kinematic investigations (den Heijer et al. 2015).”
• The ATLAS3D Project – XXX. Star formation histories and stellar population scaling relations of early-type galaxies (2015, result): “Likewise, in previous papers of the ATLAS3D series, we have reported on truncated distributions of molecular gas (Davis et al. 2013) and a lack of extended H I discs (Serra et al. 2012) within Virgo compared to lower density regions, further supporting this picture.”
• The ATLAS3D project - XXIX. The new look of early-type galaxies and surrounding fields disclosed by extremely deep optical images (2014, background): “The presence of star–forming regions in the outskirts of some ETGs was already known from UV observations (e.g. Jeong et al. 2007; Donovan et al. 2009; Marino et al. 2011), with possibly H I fueling them (e.g. van Driel & van Woerden 1991; Serra et al. 2012).”
• Raining on black holes and massive galaxies: the top-down multiphase condensation model (2016, background): “Ionized gas (Hβ, [O++] and [N I]) is observed in 73 per cent of the sample (Davis et al. 2011), H I gas in 40 per cent (Serra et al. 2012) and molecular MNRAS 466, 677–704 (2017) D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /m nras/article-abstract/466/1/677/2617731 by guest on 15 M arch 2020 CO gas…”
• (Almost) Dark Galaxies in the ALFALFA Survey: Isolated H i-bearing Ultra-diffuse Galaxies (2017, methodology): “We reduced the WSRT data following the same pro- cess described in Janowiecki et al. (2015) and Leisman et al. (2016), using the automated pipeline of MIRIAD (Sault et al. 1995) data software wrapped with a Python script (see Serra et al. 2012; Wang et al. 2013).”
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• The fast molecular outflow in the Seyfert galaxy IC 5063 as seen by ALMA (2015, background): “…in the available and new observing facilities, has opened new and important avenues for the study of formation and evolution of early-type galaxies using this component of their interstellar medium (ISM; see e.g. Young et al. 2011; Serra et al. 2012, 2014; Davis et al. 2013; Alatalo et al. 2013).”
• Structure and Kinematics of Early-Type Galaxies from Integral Field Spectroscopy (2016, background): “In some cases faint spiral arms become visible in ETGs with very deep optical (Duc et al. 2011, 2015) or HI observations (Serra et al. 2012).”