Tidal Tails in Interacting Galaxies: Formation of Compact Stellar Structures
Abstract
We have used V- and I- band images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to identify compact stellar clusters within the tidal tails of twelve different interacting galaxies. The seventeen tails within our sample span a physical parameter space of HI/stellar masses, tail pressure and density through their diversity of tail lengths, optical brightnesses, mass ratios, HI column densities, stage on the Toomre sequence, and tail kinematics. Our preliminary findings in this study indicate that star cluster demographics of the tidal tail environment are compatible with the current understanding of star cluster formation in quiescent systems, possibly only needing changes in certain parameters or normalization of the Schechter cluster initial mass function (CIMF) to replicate what we observe in color-magnitude diagrams and a brightest absolute magnitude -- log N plot.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0908.4308,
title = {Tidal Tails in Interacting Galaxies: Formation of Compact Stellar Structures},
author = {B. Mullan and J. C. Charlton and I. S. Konstantopoulos and N. Bastian and R. Chandar and P. R. Durrell and D. Elmegreen and J. English and S. C. Gallagher and C. Gronwall and J. E. Hibbard and S. Hunsberger and K. E. Johnson and A. Kepley and K. Knierman and B. Koribalski and K. H. Lee and A. Maybhate and C. Palma and W. D. Vacca},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.4308},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
To appear in the Proceedings of the Galaxy Wars: Stellar Populations and Star Formation in Interacting Galaxies Conference