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Dark Matter in Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies in the Virgo Cluster from their Globular Cluster Populations

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-04-11 v1

Abstract

We present Keck/DEIMOS spectroscopy of globular clusters (GCs) around the ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) VLSB-B, VLSB-D, and VCC615 located in the central regions of the Virgo cluster. We spectroscopically identify 4, 12, and 7 GC satellites of these UDGs, respectively. We find that the three UDGs have systemic velocities (VsysV_{sys}) consistent with being in the Virgo cluster, and that they span a wide range of velocity dispersions, from 16\sim 16 to 47\sim 47 km/s, and high dynamical mass-to-light ratios within the radius that contains half the number of GCs (407407+916 407^{+916}_{-407}, 2111+1521^{+15}_{-11}, 6038+6560^{+65}_{-38}, respectively). VLSB-D shows possible evidence for rotation along the stellar major axis and its VsysV_{sys} is consistent with that of the massive galaxy M84 and the center of the Virgo cluster itself. These findings, in addition to having a dynamically and spatially (1\sim 1 kpc) off-centered nucleus and being extremely elongated, suggest that VLSB-D could be tidally perturbed. On the contrary, VLSB-B and VCC615 show no signals of tidal deformation. Whereas the dynamics of VLSB-D suggest that it has a less massive dark matter halo than expected for its stellar mass, VLSB-B and VCC615 are consistent with a 1012\sim 10^{12} M_{\odot} dark matter halo. Although our samples of galaxies and GCs are small, these results suggest that UDGs may be a diverse population, with their low surface brightnesses being the result of very early formation, tidal disruption, or a combination of the two.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.09768,
  title  = {Dark Matter in Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies in the Virgo Cluster from their Globular Cluster Populations},
  author = {Elisa Toloba and Sungsoon Lim and Eric Peng and Laura V. Sales and Puragra Guhathakurta and J. Christopher Mihos and Patrick Cote and Alessandro Boselli and Jean-Charles Cuillandre and Laura Ferrarese and Stephen Gwyn and Ariane Lancon and Roberto Munoz and Thomas Puzia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.09768},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

8 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters