Other
Scientific paper
May 1992
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1992aas...180.4701s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 180th AAS Meeting, #47.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 24, p.806
Other
Scientific paper
Polar ring galaxies are early type galaxies with outer rings of gas, dust and stars in orbits approximately perpendicular to the plane of the flattened central galaxy. These beautiful and relatively rare objects are thought to be the product of galaxy interactions, although it is not known whether the rings represent material that has been tidally stripped from a neighbor, accreted from a gas-rich environment, or dispersed during a wholesale capture of a companion. Polar ring galaxies differ from their cousins, minor axis dust-lane ellipticals, in that their polar rings generally extend far beyond the body of the central galaxy, which given its fast rotation, is often typed as an S0 disk rather than an elliptical. Furthermore, recent surveys in the 21cm line of neutral hydrogen have shown that polar ring galaxies are quite often associated with significant amounts of neutral gas; synthesis mapping has shown this gas to be associated with the polar ring itself and to exhibit kinematics similar to that of the optical emission line gas in the ring. In addition to being fascinating astronomical objects in their own right, the rotation of the polar rings in a plane perpendicular to their central disks provides a unique dynamical probe of the shape of the underlying potentials, and thus the shape of dark matter halos. If the dark matter in these systems were the dominant gravitational component and perfectly spherical, the rotation curves of the ring and disk should be identical; early observations suggested that this might indeed be the case. In a flattened potential, on the other hand, the gas velocity field of the polar ring will depart measurably from that expected for circular orbits. Improved detectors and more detailed dynamical modeling now allow improved estimates of the shape of the gravitational potential in these systems. A progress report suggesting that dark halos are often quite flattened will be presented.
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