Dust Deficiency in the Interacting Galaxy NGC 3077

Jairo Armijos-Abendaño,Crispin Logan,Ericson López,Franklin Aldás,Mario Llerena

doi:10.3390/galaxies5030053

Abstract

Using 70 μ m observations taken with the PACS instrument of the Herschel space telescope, the dust content of the nearby and interacting spiral galaxy NGC 3077 has been compared with the dust content of the isolated galaxies such as NGC 2841, NGC 3184 and NGC 3351. The dust content has allowed us to derive dust-to-gas ratios for the four spiral galaxies of our sample. We find that NGC 2841, NGC 3184 and NGC 3351 have dust masses of 6.5–9.1 × 10 7 M ⊙ , which are a factor of ∼10 higher than the value found for NGC 3077. This result shows that NGC 3077 is a dust deficient galaxy, as was expected, because this galaxy is affected by tidal interactions with its neighboring galaxies M81 and M82. NGC 3077 reveals a dust-to-gas ratio of 17.5%, much higher than the average ratio of 1.8% of the isolated galaxies, evidencing that NGC 3077 is also deficient in H 2 + HI gas. Therefore, it seems that, in this galaxy, gas has been stripped more efficiently than dust.

Highlights

Several studies have shown that galaxies located in high density environments lose atomic neutral hydrogen (HI) due to tidal interactions [1], simultaneous ram pressure and tidal interactions [2], among other mechanisms such as viscous stripping [3] and thermal evaporation [4]
This correlation can be tested by comparing the NGC 2841, NGC 3077, NGC 3184 and NGC 3351 maps given in Figure 1 of [12] with the maps of galaxies given in Figure 1 of this work
We studied the dust content and dust-to-gas ratios of four nearby spiral galaxies

Summary

Introduction

Several studies have shown that galaxies located in high density environments lose atomic neutral hydrogen (HI) due to tidal interactions [1], simultaneous ram pressure and tidal interactions [2], among other mechanisms such as viscous stripping [3] and thermal evaporation [4]. Galaxies in high density environments have less HI content than isolated galaxies [5,6]. There are few works devoted to the study of environmental effects of spiral galaxies on dust content; as examples, we have the studies of [7,8]. HI gas and dust is stripped in spiral galaxies located in a cluster environment [7,8], where HI gas is stripped more efficiently than dust [7]. The authors of [9] have studied the emission of dust from a large sample of nearby galaxies, including the galaxies addressed in this paper. Their work focused on the dust-to-gas ratios derived from maps of dust mass surface density, obtained from pixel-by-pixel modeling of infrared data

Objectives

Results

Conclusion