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1. Young, Blue, and Isolated Stellar Systems in the Virgo Cluster. II. A New Class of Stellar System

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac7c6c  

   Jones, Michael G.; Sand, David J.; Bellazzini, Michele; Spekkens, Kristine; Karunakaran, Ananthan; Adams, Elizabeth A. K.; Battaglia, Giuseppina; Beccari, Giacomo; Bennet, Paul; Cannon, John M.; et al (August 2022, The Astrophysical Journal)

   Abstract We discuss five blue stellar systems in the direction of the Virgo cluster, analogous to the enigmatic object SECCO 1 (AGC 226067). These objects were identified based on their optical and UV morphology and followed up with Hiobservations with the Very Large Array (and Green Bank Telescope), Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (on the Very Large Telescope) optical spectroscopy, and Hubble Space Telescope imaging. These new data indicate that one system is a distant group of galaxies. The remaining four are extremely low mass (M_*∼ 10⁵M_⊙), are dominated by young blue stars, have highly irregular and clumpy morphologies, are only a few kiloparsecs across, yet host an abundance of metal-rich, $12+\log \left(\mathrm{O}/\mathrm{H}\right)>8.2$, Hiiregions. These high metallicities indicate that these stellar systems formed from gas stripped from much more massive galaxies. Despite the young age of their stellar populations, only one system is detected in Hi, while the remaining three have minimal (if any) gas reservoirs. Furthermore, two systems are surprisingly isolated and have no plausible parent galaxy within ∼30′ (∼140 kpc). Although tidal stripping cannot be conclusively excluded as the formation mechanism of these objects, ram pressure stripping more naturally explains their properties, in particular their isolation, owing to the higher velocities, relative to the parent system, that can be achieved. Therefore, we posit that most of these systems formed from ram-pressure-stripped gas removed from new infalling cluster members and survived in the intracluster medium long enough to become separated from their parent galaxies by hundreds of kiloparsecs and that they thus represent a new type of stellar system. 

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2. Dark No More: The Low-luminosity Stellar Counterpart of a Dark Cloud in the Virgo Cluster*

   https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ad3ef5  

   Jones, Michael_G; Janowiecki, Steven; Dey, Swapnaneel; Sand, David_J; Bennet, Paul; Crnojević, Denija; Fielder, Catherine_E; Karunakaran, Ananthan; Kent, Brian_R; Mazziotti, Nicolas; et al (April 2024, The Astrophysical Journal Letters)

   Abstract We have discovered the stellar counterpart to the ALFALFA Virgo 7 cloud complex, which has been thought to be optically dark and nearly star-free since its discovery in 2007. This ∼190 kpc long chain of enormous atomic gas clouds (M_Hi∼ 10⁹M_⊙) is embedded in the hot intracluster medium of the Virgo galaxy cluster but is isolated from any galaxy. Its faint, blue stellar counterpart, BC6, was identified in a visual search of archival optical and UV imaging. Follow-up observations with the Green Bank Telescope, Hobby–Eberly Telescope, and Hubble Space Telescope demonstrate that this faint counterpart is at the same velocity as the atomic gas, actively forming stars, and metal-rich (12 + (O/H) = 8.58 ± 0.25). We estimate its stellar mass to be only $\log \left(M_{*}/M_{\odot }\right)\sim 4.4$, making it one of the most gas-rich stellar systems known. Aside from its extraordinary gas content, the properties of BC6 are entirely consistent with those of a recently identified class of young, low-mass, isolated, and star-forming clouds in Virgo that appear to have formed via extreme ram pressure stripping events. We expand the existing discussion of the origin of this structure and suggest NGC 4522 as a likely candidate; however, the current evidence is not fully consistent with any of our proposed progenitor galaxies. We anticipate that other “dark” gas clouds in Virgo may have similarly faint, star-forming counterparts. We aim to identify these through the help of a citizen science search of the entire cluster. 

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3. The Gas in Virgo’s “Red and Dead” Dwarf Elliptical Galaxies

   Hallenbeck, Gregory L.; Koopmann, Rebecca A. (January 2017, American Astronomical Society ... meeting)

   As star-forming dwarf irregulars and faint spirals fall onto a cluster, their gas content is easily and quickly removed by ram-pressure stripping or other cluster forces. Residual signs of star formation cease within 100 Myr, and only after approximately 1 Gyr do their optical features transition to elliptical.Despite this, ALFALFA has uncovered a population of three “red and dead” dwarf ellipticals in the Virgo Cluster which still have detectable reservoirs of HI. These dwarf ellipticals are extremely gas-rich—as gas-rich as the cluster’s star-forming dwarf irregulars (Hallenbeck et al. 2012). Where does this gas come from? We consider two possibilities. First, that the gas is recently acquired, and has not yet had time to form stars. Second, that the gas is primordial, and has been disrupted from being able to form stars during the current epoch.We present deep optical (using CFHT and KPNO) and HI (Arecibo and VLA) observations of this sample to demonstrate that this gas is primordial. These observations show that all three galaxies have exponentially decreasing profiles characteristic of dwarf ellipticals and that their rotation velocities are extremely low. However, like more massive elliptical galaxies with HI, these dwarf galaxies show irregular optical morphology. For one target, VCC 190, we additionally observe an HI tail consistent with a recent interaction with the massive spiral galaxy NGC 4224. 

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4. It’s a Breeze: The Circumgalactic Medium of a Dwarf Galaxy Is Easy to Strip

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad6c3f  

   Zhu, Jingyao; Tonnesen, Stephanie; Bryan, Greg_L; Putman, Mary_E (October 2024, The Astrophysical Journal)

   Abstract The circumgalactic medium (CGM) of star-forming dwarf galaxies plays a key role in regulating the galactic baryonic cycle. We investigate how susceptible the CGM of dwarf satellite galaxies is to ram pressure stripping in Milky Way–like environments. In a suite of hydrodynamical wind tunnel simulations, we model an intermediate-mass dwarf satellite galaxy (M_*= 10^7.2M_⊙) with a multiphase interstellar medium (ISM;M_ISM= 10^7.9M_⊙) and CGM (M_CGM,vir= 10^8.5M_⊙) along two first-infall orbits to more than 500 Myr past pericenter of a Milky Way–like host. The spatial resolution is ∼79 pc in the star-forming ISM and 316−632 pc in the CGM. Our simulations show that the dwarf satellite CGM removal is fast and effective: more than 95% of the CGM mass is ram pressure stripped within a few hundred megayears, even under a weak ram pressure orbit where the ISM stripping is negligible. The conditions for CGM survival are consistent with the analytical halo gas stripping predictions in McCarthy et al. We also find that including the satellite CGM does not effectively shield its galaxy, and therefore the ISM stripping rate is unaffected. Our results imply that a dwarf galaxy CGM is unlikely to be detected in satellite galaxies; and that the star formation of gaseous dwarf satellites is likely devoid of replenishment from a CGM. 

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5. A Virgo Environmental Survey Tracing Ionised Gas Emission (VESTIGE): VI. Environmental quenching on HII-region scales

   https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201937310  

   Boselli, A.; Fossati, M.; Longobardi, A.; Boissier, S.; Boquien, M.; Braine, J.; Côté, P.; Cuillandre, J. C.; Epinat, B.; Ferrarese, L.; et al (February 2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics)

   The Virgo Environmental Survey Tracing Ionised Gas Emission (VESTIGE) is a blind narrow-band H α + [NII] imaging survey of the Virgo cluster carried out with MegaCam at the Canada-French-Hawaii telescope. We use a new set of data extracted from VESTIGE to study the impact of the hostile cluster environment on the star formation process down to the scale of HII regions (∼50 pc). Here, HII regions are identified and their parameters measured using the HII PHOT code on a sample of 114 late-type galaxies spanning a wide range in morphological type (Sa-Sd, Im, BCD), stellar mass (10 6.5  ≤  M star  ≤ 10 11 M ⊙ ), and star formation activity (10 −3  ≤ SFR ≤ 10 M ⊙ yr −1 ). Owing to the exquisite average resolution of the VESTIGE data (0.65 arcsec), we detect 11302 HII regions with an H α luminosity L (H α ) ≥ 10 37 erg s −1 . We show that the typical number of HII regions in gas-stripped objects is significantly lower than in healthy late-types of similar stellar mass. We also show that in these gas-stripped galaxies the number of HII regions significantly drops outside the effective radius, suggesting that the quenching process occurs outside-in, in agreement with other multifrequency observations. These new results consistently confirm that the main mechanism responsible for the decrease of the star formation activity observed in cluster galaxies is ram pressure, allowing us to discard other milder processes such as starvation or strangulation, which are unable to reproduce the observed radially truncated profiles. 

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