scholarly journals The Magellanic System: the puzzle of the leading gas stream

2019 ◽  
Vol 488 (1) ◽  
pp. 918-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thor Tepper-García ◽  
Joss Bland-Hawthorn ◽  
Marcel S Pawlowski ◽  
Tobias K Fritz

ABSTRACT The Magellanic Clouds (MCs) are the most massive gas-bearing systems falling into the Galaxy at the present epoch. They show clear signs of interaction, manifested in particular by the Magellanic Stream, a spectacular gaseous wake that trails from the MCs extending more than 150° across the sky. Ahead of the MCs is the ‘Leading Arm’ usually interpreted as the tidal counterpart of the Magellanic Stream, an assumption we now call into question. We revisit the formation of these gaseous structures in a first-infall scenario, including for the first time a Galactic model with a weakly magnetized, spinning hot corona. In agreement with previous studies, we recover the location and the extension of the Stream on the sky. In contrast, we find that the formation of the Leading Arm – that is otherwise present in models without a corona – is inhibited by the hydrodynamic interaction with the hot component. These results hold with or without coronal rotation or a weak, ambient magnetic field. Since the existence of the hot corona is well established, we are led to two possible interpretations: (i) the Leading Arm survives because the coronal density beyond 20 kpc is a factor ≳10 lower than required by conventional spheroidal coronal X-ray models, in line with recent claims of rapid coronal rotation; or (ii) the ‘Leading Arm’ is cool gas trailing from a frontrunner, a satellite moving ahead of the MCs, consistent with its higher metallicity compared to the trailing stream. Both scenarios raise issues that we discuss.

1977 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. S. Mathewson ◽  
M. P. Schwarz ◽  
J. D. Murray

New observations of the Magellanic Stream were made in December 1976 with the 64-m radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory of CSIRO. The ridges of H I emission of the Stream were traced from near its tip at ℓ = 90°, b = -40° to the Magellanic Clouds. This was the first time that the total length of the Stream was observed with the one system (only possible from the southern hemisphere) and with high spatial (15’ of arc) and velocity (4 km s-1) resolution. The results of this survey are presented in Figures 1 and 2 and the main features are listed below.


1996 ◽  
Vol 169 ◽  
pp. 713-714
Author(s):  
S. A. Kutuzov

The interval method of estimating model parameters (MPs) for the Galaxy was suggested earlier (Kutuzov 1988). Intervals are proposed to be used both for observational estimates of galactic parameters (GPs) and for the values of MPs. In this work we consider a model as a tool for studying mutual interaction of GPs. Two-component model is considered (Kutuzov, Ossipkov 1989). We have to estimate the array P of eight MPs.


Author(s):  
Carlos R Argüelles ◽  
Manuel I Díaz ◽  
Andreas Krut ◽  
Rafael Yunis

Abstract The formation and stability of collisionless self-gravitating systems is a long standing problem, which dates back to the work of D. Lynden-Bell on violent relaxation, and extends to the issue of virialization of dark matter (DM) halos. An important prediction of such a relaxation process is that spherical equilibrium states can be described by a Fermi-Dirac phase-space distribution, when the extremization of a coarse-grained entropy is reached. In the case of DM fermions, the most general solution develops a degenerate compact core surrounded by a diluted halo. As shown recently, the latter is able to explain the galaxy rotation curves while the DM core can mimic the central black hole. A yet open problem is whether this kind of astrophysical core-halo configurations can form at all, and if they remain stable within cosmological timescales. We assess these issues by performing a thermodynamic stability analysis in the microcanonical ensemble for solutions with given particle number at halo virialization in a cosmological framework. For the first time we demonstrate that the above core-halo DM profiles are stable (i.e. maxima of entropy) and extremely long lived. We find the existence of a critical point at the onset of instability of the core-halo solutions, where the fermion-core collapses towards a supermassive black hole. For particle masses in the keV range, the core-collapse can only occur for Mvir ≳ E9M⊙ starting at zvir ≈ 10 in the given cosmological framework. Our results prove that DM halos with a core-halo morphology are a very plausible outcome within nonlinear stages of structure formation.


Author(s):  
Andrea Afruni ◽  
Filippo Fraternali ◽  
Gabriele Pezzulli

Abstract The characterization of the large amount of gas residing in the galaxy halos, the so called circumgalactic medium (CGM), is crucial to understand galaxy evolution across cosmic time. We focus here on the the cool (T ∼ 104 K) phase of this medium around star-forming galaxies in the local universe, whose properties and dynamics are poorly understood. We developed semi-analytical parametric models to describe the cool CGM as an outflow of gas clouds from the central galaxy, as a result of supernova explosions in the disc (galactic wind). The cloud motion is driven by the galaxy gravitational pull and by the interactions with the hot (T ∼ 106 K) coronal gas. Through a bayesian analysis, we compare the predictions of our models with the data of the COS-Halos and COS-GASS surveys, which provide accurate kinematic information of the cool CGM around more than 40 low-redshift star-forming galaxies, probing distances up to the galaxy virial radii. Our findings clearly show that a supernova-driven outflow model is not suitable to describe the dynamics of the cool circumgalactic gas. Indeed, to reproduce the data, we need extreme scenarios, with initial outflow velocities and mass loading factors that would lead to unphysically high energy coupling from the supernovae to the gas and with supernova efficiencies largely exceeding unity. This strongly suggests that, since the outflows cannot reproduce most of the cool gas absorbers, the latter are likely the result of cosmological inflow in the outer galaxy halos, in analogy to what we have previously found for early-type galaxies.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (S298) ◽  
pp. 404-404
Author(s):  
Cuihua Du ◽  
Yunpeng Jia ◽  
Xiyan Peng

AbstractBased on the South Galactic Cap U-band Sky Survey (SCUSS) and SDSS observation, we adopted the star-count method to analyze the stellar distribution in different directions of the Galaxy. We find that these model parameters may be variable with observed direction, which cannot simply be attributed to statistical errors.


Author(s):  
D. Lynden-Bell ◽  
William E. Kunkel ◽  
A. G. D. Philip ◽  
A. G. Davis

2000 ◽  
Vol 176 ◽  
pp. 157-160
Author(s):  
E. Antonello ◽  
L. Mantegazza ◽  
D. Fugazza ◽  
M. Bossi ◽  
S. Covino

AbstractA summary of the first results of a search for Cepheids in IC 1613 is reported along with a short discussion of the adopted technique, a comparison of the characteristics of Cepheid light curves in the Galaxy, Magellanic Clouds and IC 1613, and a possible application for a P–L relation derivation. First overtone Cepheids have been identified for the first time in a galaxy farther than the Magellanic Clouds.


2019 ◽  
Vol 623 ◽  
pp. A84 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. S. Clark ◽  
M. E. Lohr ◽  
L. R. Patrick ◽  
F. Najarro

The Arches is one of the youngest, densest and most massive clusters in the Galaxy. As such it provides a unique insight into the lifecycle of the most massive stars known and the formation and survival of such stellar aggregates in the extreme conditions of the Galactic Centre. In a previous study we presented an initial stellar census for the Arches and in this work we expand upon this, providing new and revised classifications for ∼30% of the 105 spectroscopically identified cluster members as well as distinguishing potential massive runaways. The results of this survey emphasise the homogeneity and co-evality of the Arches and confirm the absence of H-free Wolf-Rayets of WC sub-type and predicted luminosities. The increased depth of our complete dataset also provides significantly better constraints on the main sequence population; with the identification of O9.5 V stars for the first time we now spectroscopically sample stars with initial masses ranging from ∼16 M⊙ to ≥120 M⊙. Indeed, following from our expanded stellar census we might expect ≳50 stars within the Arches to have been born with masses ≳60 M⊙, while all 105 spectroscopically confirmed cluster members are massive enough to leave relativistic remnants upon their demise. Moreover the well defined observational properties of the main sequence cohort will be critical to the construction of an extinction law appropriate for the Galactic Centre and consequently the quantitative analysis of the Arches population and subsequent determination of the cluster initial mass function.


1999 ◽  
Vol 186 ◽  
pp. 31-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Fujimoto ◽  
T. Sawa ◽  
Y. Kumai

A tidal model has been introduced to the triple system of the Galaxy, Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (the LMC and SMC hereafter) and successfully reproduced the Magellanic Stream (Murai and Fujimoto 1980; Lin and Lynden-Bell 1982; Gardiner et al. 1994; Gardiner and Noguchi 1995; Lin et al. 1995), a narrow band of diffuse atomic hydrogen gas emerging from the SMC region, passing by the South Galactic Pole along an overhead great circle spanning over 100° (Wannier and Wrixon 1972; Mathewson et al. 1974). The LMC and SMC have a hydrogen bridge and common envelope (Hindman 1964; McGee and Milton 1966) and, therefore, we can consider that they have been in a binary state for the Hubble time, revolving together around the Galaxy with a halo whose mass is larger than 1012M⊙ if the flat rotation curve extends up to more than 100 kpc. The strong gravitational force due to this heavy halo attracts the Magellanic Stream and produces the high negative radial velocities (Murai and Fujimoto 1980).


1993 ◽  
Vol 155 ◽  
pp. 557-566
Author(s):  
Joachim Köppen

For a first interpretation of the comparison of observational data, the crude “Simple Model” of chemical evolution is quite useful. Since it has well been described in the literature (e.g. Pagel and Patchett 1975, Tinsley 1980), let us here just review the assumptions and whether they are satisfied: 1.The galaxy is a closed system, with no exchange of matter with its surroundings: For the solar neighbourhood this probably is not true (the infamous Gdwarf-“problem”, Pagel 1989b). For the Magellanic Clouds this is most certainly wrong, because of the presence of the Inter-Cloud Region and the Magellanic Stream, and evidence for interaction with each other and the Galaxy as well (cf. e.g. Westerlund 1990).2.It initially consists entirely of gas (without loss of generality of primordial composition): This is good approximation also for models with gas infall, as long as the infall occurs with a time scale shorter than the star formation time scale.3.The metal production of the average stellar generation (the yield y) is constant with time: Initially, it is reasonable to make this assumption. For tables of the oxygen yield see Koppen and Arimoto (1991).4.The metal rich gas ejected by the stars is completely mixed with the ambient gas. To neglect the finite stellar life times (“instantaneous recycling approximation”) is appropriate for elements synthesized in stars whose life time is much shorter than the star formation time scale, such as oxygen, neon, sulphur, and argon.5.The gas is well mixed at all times: We don't know. The dispersion of H II region abundances may give an indication. In the Magellanic Clouds Dufour (1984) finds quite a low value (±0.08 dex for oyxgen).


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