Other
Scientific paper
Dec 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001aas...199.9710m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 199th AAS Meeting, #97.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.1451
Other
Scientific paper
Observations with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer have revealed the presence of emission from O VI ions in the hot halo of the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 4631. To our knowledge, this is the first detection of O VI in emission in a spiral galaxy other than the Milky Way. We believe that this detection is the best evidence yet for a "galactic fountain" operating in a spiral galaxy. In a galactic fountain, hot gas from multiple, overlapping supernovae rises into the halo of a galaxy, cools, and falls back to the disk (Shapiro and Field, 1976, ApJ, 205, 762). As the galactic fountain gas cools through a temperature of 300,000 K it will emit strong O VI lines. Emission from O VI was detected in two positions north and east of the nucleus of NGC 4631. The upper position is on the peak of the soft (0.13-0.3 kev) X-ray emission detected by Wang et al. (1995, ApJ, 439, 176) using ROSAT and the lower position is between a series of H-alpha features that have been identified as possible superbubbles and chimneys by Wang et al. (2001, ApJ, 555, L99). The detection of O VI in emission allows us to estimate the total mass flux and luminosity of the cooling gas assuming that the O VI has the same distribution as the soft X-ray emission seen by ROSAT and Chandra. In addition, we compute these same quantities assuming that the O VI halo covers the entire galaxy. We compare these results to the estimated mechanical power input by supernovae. Cycle 3 FUSE observations will allow us to better constrain the total cooling luminosity by determining the extent of the O VI halo. This work is supported by NASA contract NAS5-32985 to the Johns Hopkins University.
FUSE Science Team
Howk Chris J.
Murphy Eamonn M.
Oegerle William R.
Otte Birgit
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