Young, blue, and isolated stellar systems in the Virgo Cluster. I. 2-D Optical spectroscopy
Abstract
We use panoramic optical spectroscopy obtained with MUSE@VLT to investigate the nature of five candidate extremely isolated low-mass star forming regions (Blue Candidates, BCs hereafter) toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies. Four of the five (BC1, BC3, BC4, BC5) are found to host several HII regions and to have radial velocities fully compatible with being part of the Virgo cluster. All the confirmed candidates have mean metallicity significantly in excess of that expected from their stellar mass, indicating that they originated from gas stripped from larger galaxies. In summary, these four candidates share the properties of the prototype system SECCO 1, suggesting the possible emergence of a new class of stellar systems, intimately linked to the complex duty cycle of gas within clusters of galaxies. A thorough discussion on the nature and evolution of these objects is presented in a companion paper, where the results obtained here from MUSE data are complemented with Hubble Space Telescope (optical) and Very Large Array (HI) observations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2206.13971,
title = {Young, blue, and isolated stellar systems in the Virgo Cluster. I. 2-D Optical spectroscopy},
author = {M. Bellazzini and L. Magrini and M. G. Jones and D. J. Sand and G. Beccari and G. Cresci and K. Spekkens and A. Karunakaran and E. A. K. Adams and D. Zaritsky and G. Battaglia and A. Seth and J. M. Cannon and J. Fuson and J. L. Inoue and B. Mutlu-Pakdil and P. Guhathakurta and R. Munoz and P. Bennet and D. Crnojevic and N. Caldwell and J. Strader and E. Toloba},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.13971},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
accepted for publication by ApJ. Latex. 16 pages, 8 color figures