GALAXY-WIDE SHOCKS IN LATE-MERGER STAGE LUMINOUS INFRARED GALAXIES
By J. Rich, Lisa J. Kewley, M. Dopita. 2011
171 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present an integral field spectroscopic study of two nearby luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs), IC 1623 and NGC 3256, which exhibit evidence of widespread shock excitation induced by ongoing merger activity. We show the importance of carefully separating excitation due to shocks versus excitation by H ii regions and the usefulness of integral field unit data in interpreting the complex processes in LIRGs. Our analysis focuses primarily on the emission line gas, which is extensive in both systems and is a result of the abundant ongoing star formation as well as widespread LINER-like excitation from shocks. We use emission line ratio maps, line kinematics, line-ratio diagnostics, and new models as methods for distinguishing and analyzing shocked gas in these systems. We discuss how our results inform the merger sequence associated with local U/LIRGs and the impact that widespread shock excitation has on the interpretation of emission line spectra and derived quantities of both local and high-redshift galaxies.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dffc02dced013d5ae869a25ce927af84e65ce8ac
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Citations in the corpus
- Observations of feedback from radio-quiet quasars - I. Extents and morphologies of ionized gas nebulae (2013, background): “Shocks propagating at several hundred km s−1 normally do not produce [O iii]/Hβ ∼ 10 (Rich et al. 2011) as seen in our quasars, and thus they are normally disfavored as the primary origin of narrow line emission.”
- THEORETICAL EVOLUTION OF OPTICAL STRONG LINES ACROSS COSMIC TIME (2013, methodology): “Extended LINER emission (> 1 kpc) may be produced by shock excitation (Heckman 1980; Ĺıpari et al. 2004; Monreal-Ibero et al. 2006; Sharp & Bland-Hawthorn 2010; Rich et al. 2010, 2011).”
- THE MULTIPHASE STRUCTURE AND POWER SOURCES OF GALACTIC WINDS IN MAJOR MERGERS (2013, background): “This is suggestive of a line flux mixing model, with a varying contribution of star formation and shocks determining the line ratios (Rich et al. 2011; Westmoquette et al. 2012).”
- Nuclear activity versus star formation: emission-line diagnostics at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths (2015, background): “In this paper, we have not investigated the spectral signatures of photoionization by shocks, which can also contribute to the observed emission-line spectra of galaxies (Rich et al. 2011).”
- EVIDENCE FOR WIDE-SPREAD ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS-DRIVEN OUTFLOWS IN THE MOST MASSIVE z ∼ 1–2 STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2014, background): “…derived from the (A color version of this figure is available in the online journal.) data of our sample and compares them with various recent excitation/ionization models (Kewley et al. 2001, 2006, 2013; Allen et al. 2008; Rich et al. 2010, 2011; Sharp & BlandHawthorn 2010; Newman et al. 2014).”
- SDSS IV MaNGA – spatially resolved diagnostic diagrams: a proof that many galaxies are LIERs (2016, background): “A correlation between line ratio and velocity dispersion has often been considered a good test for shock ionisation (MonrealIbero et al. 2006; Rich et al. 2011, 2014).”
- The SAMI Galaxy Survey: shocks and outflows in a normal star-forming galaxy (2014, background): “Such clear separation of different kinematic components on BPT diagrams, and the obvious correlations between the line ratios and velocity dispersions have also been observed in late-stage mergers with galactic-wide shock activities (Rich et al. 2011).”