Galaxy destruction and diffuse light in clusters     

Carlos Calcáneo-Roldán  Ben Moore  Joss Bland-Hawthorn  David Malin  Elaine M. Sadler 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,314(2):324-333

Deep images of the Centaurus and Coma clusters reveal two spectacular arcs of diffuse light that stretch for over 100 kpc, yet are just a few kiloparsecs wide. At a surface brightness of m _b ∼27–28 mag arcsec⁻² , the Centaurus arc is the most striking example known of structure in the diffuse light component of a rich galaxy cluster. We use numerical simulations to show that the Centaurus feature can be reproduced by the tidal debris of a spiral galaxy that has been tidally disrupted by the gravitational potential of NGC 4709. The surface brightness and narrow dimensions of the diffuse light suggest that the disc was corotating with its orbital path past pericentre. Features this prominent in clusters will be relatively rare, although at fainter surface brightness levels the diffuse light will reveal a wealth of structure. Deeper imaging surveys may be able to trace this feature for several times its presently observed extent, and somewhere along the tidal debris, a fraction of the original stellar component of the disc will remain bound, but transformed into a faint spheroidal galaxy. It should be possible to confirm the galactic origin of the Centaurus arc by observing planetary nebulae along its length with redshifts close to that of NGC 4709.  相似文献   

The precession of eccentric discs in close binaries   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

J. R. Murray 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,314(1):L1-L5

If the emission of gamma-ray bursts were as a result of the synchrotron process in the standard internal shock scenario, then the typical observed spectrum should have a slope F _ν ∝ ν ^−1/2, which strongly conflicts with the much harder spectra observed. This directly follows from the cooling time being much shorter than the dynamical time. Particle re-acceleration, deviations from equipartition, quickly changing magnetic fields and adiabatic losses are found to be inadequate to account for this discrepancy. We also find that in the internal shock scenario the relativistic inverse Compton scattering is always as important as the synchrotron process, and faces the same problems. This indicates that the burst emission is not produced by relativistic electrons emitting synchrotron and inverse Compton radiation.  相似文献   

The black hole mass–galaxy age relation     

M. R. Merrifield  Duncan A. Forbes  A. I. Terlevich 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,313(2):L29-L32

We present evidence that there is a significant correlation between the fraction of the mass of a galaxy that lies in its central black hole and the age of the galactic stellar population. Since the absorption-line indices that are used to estimate the age are luminosity-weighted, they essentially measure the time since the last significant episode of star formation in the galaxy. The existence of this correlation is consistent with several theories of galaxy formation, including the currently favoured hierarchical picture of galaxy evolution, which predicts just such a relation between the black hole mass and the time since the last burst of merger-induced star formation. It is not consistent with models in which the massive black hole is primordial, and hence uncoupled from the stellar properties of the galaxy.  相似文献   

On the magnetohydrodynamic decollimation in compact objects     

V. S. Beskin  I. Okamoto 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,313(3):445-453

A simple analytical model of the particle-dominated outflow with zero total electric current from central rotating objects is considered. 'Exact' solutions for both relativistic and non-relativistic cases demonstrate the decollimation of the magnetic field lines in the region of the current closure. Such a decollimation can explain the presence of an energetic equatorial wind observed in many compact objects.  相似文献   

Galaxy clusters: oblate or prolate?     

Asantha R. Cooray 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,313(4):783-788

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The IRAS PSCz dipole     

M. Rowan-Robinson  J. Sharpe  S. J. Oliver  O. Keeble  A. Canavezes  W. Saunders  A. N. Taylor  H. Valentine  C. S. Frenk  G. P. Efstathiou  R. G. McMahon  S. D. M. White  W. Sutherland  H. Tadros  S. Maddox 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,314(2):375-397

We use the PSC z IRAS galaxy redshift survey to analyse the cosmological galaxy dipole out to a distance of 300  h ¹ Mpc. The masked area is filled in three different ways, first by sampling the whole sky at random, secondly by using neighbouring areas to fill a masked region, and thirdly using a spherical harmonic analysis. The method of treatment of the mask is found to have a significant effect on the final calculated dipole.
The conversion from redshift space to real space is accomplished by using an analytical model of the cluster and void distribution, based on 88 nearby groups, 854 clusters and 163 voids, with some of the clusters and all of the voids found from the PSC z data base.
The dipole for the whole PSC z sample appears to have converged within a distance of 200  h ¹ Mpc and yields a value for , consistent with earlier determinations from IRAS samples by a variety of methods. For b =1, the 2 range for ₀ is 0.431.02.
The direction of the dipole is within 13° of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) dipole, the main uncertainty in direction being associated with the masked area behind the Galactic plane. The improbability of further major contributions to the dipole amplitude coming from volumes larger than those surveyed here means that the question of the origin of the CMB dipole is essentially resolved.  相似文献   

The observed evolution of galaxy clustering versus epoch-dependent biasing models     

M. Magliocchetti  J. S. Bagla  S. J. Maddox  O. Lahav 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,314(3):546-556

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ASCA spectroscopy of the hard X-ray emission from the colliding wind interaction in γ² Velorum     

G. Rauw  †  I. R. Stevens  J. M. Pittard  M. F. Corcoran 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,316(1):129-136

We discuss an ASCA observation of the eccentric WC8+O7.5 III binary γ ² Velorum near apastron. The X-ray spectrum is compared with two previous observations obtained when the system was near periastron. All three spectra display a hard-emission component that undergoes strong variability over the orbital cycle. The properties of the hard X-ray emission of γ ² Vel are constrained by taking into account the contribution from contaminating soft X-ray sources in the vicinity of γ ² Vel. We find that the observed variations are in qualitative agreement with the predictions of colliding wind models. We investigate for the first time the effect of uncertainties in the chemical composition of the X-ray emitting plasma on our understanding of the high-energy properties of the wind interaction region. Our results indicate that these uncertainties significantly affect the derived shock temperature and absorption column, but play a smaller role in determining the intrinsic X-ray luminosity of the colliding wind zone. We further find that the intrinsic luminosity from the hard X-ray component in γ ² Vel does not follow the 1/ D distance relation expected from simple models of adiabatic shocks.  相似文献   

Extended line emission around seven radio-loud quasars at redshift z ∼ 2     

R. J. Wilman  R. M. Johnstone  C. S. Crawford 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,317(1):9-22

We present near-infrared spectra of seven radio-loud quasars with a median redshift of 2.1, five of which were previously known to have Ly α nebulae. Extended [O  iii ] λ 5007 and H α emission are evident around six objects, at the level of a few times 10⁻¹⁶ erg cm⁻² arcsec⁻² s⁻¹ within ≃2 arcsec of the nucleus (≡16 kpc in the adopted cosmology). Nuclear [O  ii ] λ 3727 is detected in three of the five quasars studied at this wavelength and clearly extended in one of them.
The extended [O  iii ] tends to be brighter on the side of the nucleus with the stronger, jet-like radio emission, indicating at least that the extranuclear gas is distributed anisotropically. It is also typically redshifted by several hundred km s⁻¹ from the nuclear [O  iii ], perhaps because of the latter being blueshifted from the host galaxy's systemic velocity. Alternatively, the velocity shifts could be due to infall (which is suggested by linewidths ∼1000 km s⁻¹ FWHM) in combination with a suitable dust geometry. Ly α /H α ratios well below the case B value suggest that some dust is present.
Photoionization modelling of the [O  iii ]/[O  ii ] ratios in the extended gas suggests that its pressure is around or less than a few times 10⁷ cm⁻³ K; any confining intracluster medium is thus likely to host a strong cooling flow. A comparison with lower redshift work suggests that there has been little evolution in the nuclear emission-line properties of radio-loud quasars between redshifts 1 and 2.  相似文献   

The small-scale structure in interstellar H i: a resolvable puzzle     

Avinash A. Deshpande 《Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society》2000,317(1):199-204

During the past decade or so, measurements of Galactic H  i absorption using VLBI against extragalactic sources, as well as multi-epoch observations in pulsar directions, have detected small-scale transverse variations corresponding to tens of au at the distance of the absorbing matter. Hitherto these measurements have been interpreted as small-scale structure in the H  i distribution with densities n _{H  i} ∼10⁴–10⁵ cm⁻³, orders of magnitude greater than those of the pc-scale structure. Naturally, it is difficult to imagine how such structures could exist in equilibrium with other components of the ISM.
In this paper we show that structure on all scales contributes to the differences on neighbouring lines of sight, and that the observed differences can be accounted for by a natural extension of the distribution of irregularities in the distribution of H  i opacities at larger scales, using a single power law. This, in our opinion, should put an end to the decades-long puzzle of the so-called small-scale structure in H  i and other species in the Galaxy.  相似文献