English

The Distance to the Galaxy Coma P

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-06-28 v1

Abstract

If the extremely low surface brightness galaxy Coma P lies at 5.5±0.35.5\pm0.3 Mpc as recently proposed then it would have an extraordinarily deviant peculiar velocity of 900\sim900 km s1\mathrm{s^{-1}} at a location where differential velocities between galaxies are low. We have accessed the images from the HST archives used to derive the literature distance from the magnitude of the tip of the red giant branch. Our analysis gives the distance to be 10.9±1.010.9\pm1.0 Mpc. At this location the galaxy lies within the infall region of the Virgo Cluster, such that its still considerable peculiar velocity of 500\sim500 km s1\mathrm{s^{-1}} is consistent with an established model. Coma P has an unusually pronounced asymptotic giant branch relative to its red giant branch. The dominant stellar population is just a few Gyr old.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1806.04150,
  title  = {The Distance to the Galaxy Coma P},
  author = {Gagandeep S. Anand and R. Brent Tully and Igor D. Karachentsev and Dmitry I. Makarov and Lidia Makarova and Luca Rizzi and Edward J. Shaya},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.04150},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in ApJL, 7 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T02:26:16.812Z