Searching for Stars in Compact High-Velocity Clouds. II

Abstract

We address the hypothesis that High Velocity Clouds correspond to the "missing" dwarf galaxies of the Local Group predicted by cosmological simulations. To this end, we present optical and near-infrared photometry of five additional High Velocity Clouds, one of which produces Lyman series absorption on the sight line towards the Quasar Ton S210, with sufficient resolution and sensitivity to enable the detection of an associated stellar content. We do not detect significant stellar populations intrinsic to any of the five clouds. In combination with the results from our paper I, which had yielded non detections of stellar content in another five cases, we find that there is a 50% chance of getting a null result in ten trials if fewer than 7% of all High Velocity Clouds contain stars. We conclude that the population of High Velocity Clouds is an unlikely repository for the "missing" dwarfs of the Local Group.

6 pages, 3 figures. submitted to MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Gaseous Galaxy Halos
• A Comprehensive Archival Search for Counterparts to Ultra-Compact High Velocity Clouds: Five Local Volume Dwarf Galaxies
• Physical effects on compact high-velocity clouds in the circumgalactic medium
• A Search For Star Formation in the Smith Cloud
• Neutral hydrogen in galactic fountains
• A self-consistent hydrostatic mass modelling of pressure supported dwarf galaxy Leo T
• Large and small-scale structure of the Intermediate and High Velocity Clouds towards the LMC and SMC
• The StEllar Counterparts of COmpact high velocity clouds (SECCO) survey. II. Sensitivity of the survey and an Atlas of Synthetic Dwarf Galaxies
• A Spitzer-MIPS search for dust in compact high-velocity HI clouds
• The effect of saturated thermal conduction on clouds in a hot plasma
• Neutral Gas Accretion onto Nearby Galaxies
• The Baryonic Mass Estimates of the Milky Way Halo in the form of High Velocity Clouds