Theoretical astrophysics and plasma physics at RPC

Abstract:

The study of gas outside the plane of disc galaxies is crucial to understanding the circulation of material within a galaxy and between galaxies and the intergalactic environment. We present new HI observations of the edge-on galaxy NGC891, which show an extended halo component lagging behind the disc in rotation. We compare these results for NGC891 with other detections of gaseous haloes. Finally, we present a dynamical model for the formation of extra-planar gas.

Abstract:

We have obtained integral-field spectroscopy for 23 spiral bulges using INTEGRAL on the William Herschel Telescope and SPIRAL on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. This is the first two-dimensional survey directed solely at the bulges of spiral galaxies. Eleven galaxies of the sample do not have previous measurements of the stellar velocity dispersion (σ*). These data are designed to complement our Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph program for estimating black hole masses in the range 10⁶-10⁸ M ⊙ using gas kinematics from nucleated disks. These observations will serve to derive the stellar dynamical bulge properties using the traditional Mg b and Ca II triplets. We use both cross-correlation and maximum penalized likelihood to determine projected σ* in these systems and present radial velocity fields, major axis rotation curves, curves of growth, and σ* fields. Using cross-correlation to extract the low-order two-dimensional stellar dynamics we generally see coherent radial rotation and irregular velocity dispersion fields suggesting that is a nontrivial parameter to estimate. © 2005, The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.