paper

GASP III. JO36: a case of multiple environmental effects at play?

arXiv:1704.05088 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aa8f51

Abstract

The so-called jellyfish galaxies are objects exhibiting disturbed morphology, mostly in the form of tails of gas stripped from the main body of the galaxy. Several works have strongly suggested ram pressure stripping to be the mechanism driving this phenomenon. Here, we focus on one of these objects, drawn from a sample of optically selected jellyfish galaxies, and use it to validate SINOPSIS, the spectral fitting code that will be used for the analysis of the GASP (GAs Stripping Phenomena in galaxies with MUSE) survey, and study the spatial distribution and physical properties of gas and stellar populations in this galaxy. We compare the model spectra to those obtained with GANDALF, a code with similar features widely used to interpret the kinematic of stars and gas in galaxies from IFU data. We find that SINOPSIS can reproduce the pixel-by-pixel spectra of this galaxy at least as good as GANDALF does, providing reliable estimates of the underlying stellar absorption to properly correct the nebular gas emission. Using these results, we find strong evidences of a double effect of ram pressure exerted by the intracluster medium onto the gas of the galaxy. A moderate burst of star formation, dating between 20 and 500 Myr ago and involving the outer parts of the galaxy more strongly than the inner regions, was likely induced by a first interaction of the galaxy with the intracluster medium. Stripping by ram pressure, plus probable gas depletion due to star formation, contributed to create a truncated ionized gas disk. The presence of an extended stellar tail on only one side of the disk, points instead to another kind of process, likely a gravitational interaction by a fly-by or a close encounter with another galaxy in the cluster.

arXiv commentApJ in press, 26 pages, 18 figures

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