Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21112206y&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #122.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.952
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We report a large overdensity of field objects in two separate regions in the vicinity of the interacting galaxy pair M60/NGC4647, which are members of the Virgo Cluster. This population of excess field objects is found in two HST/ACS fields that are 7 and 15 arcmin away from M60/NGC4647, which correspond to 32 and 69 kpc at the distance of the pair. The spatial distributions of the field objects in these regions show a clear gradient with respect to the interacting pair. We argue that this excess population is most likely tidal ``debris'' and/or halo stars related to the galaxy pair rather than to the Virgo Cluster in general. If this interpretation is correct, their absolute magnitudes are around -4.4 mag in z-band. These objects are very red, with their (i-z) color distribution peaking at 0.6 mag. Among them, several hundreds of objects have (i-z) > 1.3 mag. We have obtained NICMOS J and H photometry for a fraction of these objects, and have found that their optical-to-near-IR colors cannot be easily explained by any known galactic stars.
The authors acknowledge the support from the NASA grants HST-GO-09780.*.
Hathi Nimish P.
Windhorst Rogier A.
Yan Haojing
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