The Widefield Arecibo Virgo Extragalactic Survey. I. New Structures in the ALFALFA Virgo 7 Cloud Complex and an Extended Tail on NGC 4522

Abstract

We are carrying out a sensitive blind survey for neutral hydrogen (H i) in the Virgo cluster and report here on the first 5° × 1° area covered, which includes two optically dark gas features: the five-cloud ALFALFA Virgo 7 complex and the stripped tail of NGC 4522. We discover a sixth cloud and low-velocity gas that extends the velocity range of the complex to over 450 km s−1, find that around half of the total H i flux comes from extended emission rather than compact clouds, and see around 150% more gas, raising the total H i mass from 5.1 × 108 M⊙ to 1.3 × 109 M⊙. This makes the identification of NGC 4445 and NGC 4424 by Kent et al. as possible progenitors of the complex less likely, as it would require an unusually high fraction of the gas removed to have been preserved in the complex. We also identify a new component to the gas tail of NGC 4522 extending to ∼200 km s−1 below the velocity range of the gas in the galaxy, pointing toward the eastern end of the complex. We consider the possibility that NGC 4522 may be the parent galaxy of the complex, but the large velocity separation (∼1800 km s−1) leads us to rule this out. We conclude that, in the absence of any better candidate, NGC 4445 remains the most likely parent galaxy, although this requires it to have been particularly gas-rich prior to the event that removed its gas into the complex.