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Creators/Authors contains: "Marasco, Antonino"

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  1. Abstract The microphysics of the intracluster medium (ICM) in galaxy clusters is still poorly understood. Observational evidence suggests that the effective viscosity is suppressed by plasma instabilities that reduce the mean free path of particles. Measuring the effective viscosity of the ICM is crucial to understanding the processes that govern its physics on small scales. The trails of ionized interstellar medium left behind by the so-called jellyfish galaxies can trace the turbulent motions of the surrounding ICM and constrain its local viscosity. We present the results of a systematic analysis of the velocity structure function (VSF) of the Hαline for ten galaxies from the GASP sample. The VSFs show a sublinear power-law scaling below 10 kpc that may result from turbulent cascading and extends to 1 kpc, which is below the supposed ICM dissipation scales of tens of kpc expected in a fluid described by Coulomb collisions. Our result constrains the local ICM viscosity to be 0.3%–25% of the expected Spitzer value. Our findings demonstrate that either the ICM particles have a smaller mean free path than expected in a regime defined by Coulomb collisions or that we are probing effects due to collisionless physics in the ICM turbulence. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 1, 2025
  2. We study the dynamics of cold molecular gas in two main-sequence galaxies at cosmic noon (zC-488879 at z  ≃ 1.47 and zC-400569 at z  ≃ 2.24) using new high-resolution ALMA observations of multiple 12 CO transitions. For zC-400569 we also reanalyze high-quality H α data from the SINS/zC-SINF survey. We find that (1) both galaxies have regularly rotating CO disks and their rotation curves are flat out to ∼8 kpc contrary to previous results pointing to outer declines in the rotation speed V rot ; (2) the intrinsic velocity dispersions are low ( σ CO  ≲ 15 km s −1 for CO and σ Hα  ≲ 37 km s −1 for H α ) and imply V rot / σ CO  ≳ 17 − 22 yielding no significant pressure support; (3) mass models using HST images display a severe disk-halo degeneracy, that is models with inner baryon dominance and models with “cuspy” dark matter halos can fit the rotation curves equally well due to the uncertainties on stellar and gas masses; and (4) Milgromian dynamics (MOND) can successfully fit the rotation curves with the same acceleration scale a 0 measured at z  ≃ 0. The question of the amount and distribution of dark matter in high- z galaxies remains unsettled due to the limited spatial extent of the available kinematic data; we discuss the suitability of various emission lines to trace extended rotation curves at high z . Nevertheless, the properties of these two high- z galaxies (high V rot / σ V ratios, inner rotation curve shapes, bulge-to-total mass ratios) are remarkably similar to those of massive spirals at z  ≃ 0, suggesting weak dynamical evolution over more than 10 Gyr of the Universe’s lifetime. 
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  3. ABSTRACT We study the gas kinematics of a sample of six isolated gas-rich low surface brightness galaxies, of the class called ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs). These galaxies have recently been shown to be outliers from the baryonic Tully–Fisher relation (BTFR), as they rotate much slower than expected given their baryonic mass, and to have a baryon fraction similar to the cosmological mean. By means of a 3D kinematic modelling fitting technique, we show that the H i in our UDGs is distributed in ‘thin’ regularly rotating discs and we determine their rotation velocity and gas velocity dispersion. We revisit the BTFR adding galaxies from other studies. We find a previously unknown trend between the deviation from the BTFR and the exponential disc scale length valid for dwarf galaxies with circular speeds ≲ 45 km s−1, with our UDGs being at the extreme end. Based on our findings, we suggest that the high baryon fractions of our UDGs may originate due to the fact that they have experienced weak stellar feedback, likely due to their low star formation rate surface densities, and as a result they did not eject significant amounts of gas out of their discs. At the same time, we find indications that our UDGs may have higher-than-average stellar specific angular momentum, which can explain their large optical scale lengths. 
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