Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.6701w&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #67.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.856
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
2
Scientific paper
The outer regions of galaxy clusters are expected to be the environment in which infalling field galaxies are transformed from mostly blue spirals with young stellar populations into red spheroidal cluster galaxies with passively ageing populations. The COMBO-17 survey has discovered a large fraction of dusty red galaxies in the infall region of the dynamic cluster complex Abell 901/902 (>150; objects at M_V<-18, more than one third of the red galaxies). Our new HST/ACS STAGES survey and spectroscopy furthermore show that these objects fall into the category of "optically passive spirals". In contrast, new data from Spitzer/MIPS show that these are indeed star-forming galaxies with the highest obscuration levels found in the cluster. At fixed mass their star formation rates are only about 3 times lower than those of regular blue galaxies. Hence, we conclude that these are galaxies caught in the act of transformation with their star formation being only partially suppressed. It is possible that optically passive spirals falling into clusters are generally still forming stars, and their further study could reveal the timescales of star formation quenching by the cluster environment. We acknowledge support from NASA HST grant GO-10395.
Aragon-Salamanca Alfonso
Bacon Dave
Balogh Michael
Barden Marco
Barraza F. D.
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