Ultradiffuse Galaxies in the Coma Cluster: Probing Their Origin and AGN Occupation Fraction

Abstract

Abstract Ultradiffuse galaxies (UDGs) exhibit low surface brightness, but their optical extent is comparable to that of Milky Way-type galaxies. In this work, we utilize Chandra X-ray observations of 404 UDGs in the Coma cluster and address two crucial goals. First, we constrain the formation scenario of UDGs by probing the X-ray emission originating from diffuse gas and from the population of unresolved low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) residing in globular clusters (GCs). It is expected that both the luminosity of the hot gas and the number of GCs, and hence the luminosity from GC-LMXBs, are proportional to the total mass of the dark matter halo. We do not detect statistically significant emission from the hot gas or from GC-LMXBs. The upper limits on the X-ray luminosities suggest that the bulk of the UDGs reside in low-mass dark matter halos, implying that they are genuine dwarf galaxies. This conclusion agrees with our previous results obtained for isolated UDGs, arguing that UDGs are a homogeneous population of galaxies. Second, we constrain the AGN occupation fraction of UDGs, i.e., the fraction of UDGs that are occupied by an active galactic nucleus, for the first time. To this end, we cross-correlate the position of detected X-ray sources in the Coma cluster with the position of UDGs. We identify two UDGs that have a luminous X-ray source at 3.″0 and 3.″2 from their center, which could be off-center AGNs. However, Monte Carlo simulations suggest that one of these sources could be the result of spatial coincidence with a background AGN. Therefore, we place an upper limit of ≲0.5% on the AGN occupation fraction of UDGs.