Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Dec 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006pabei..24..319c&link_type=abstract
Progress in Astronomy (ISSN 1000-8349), Vol. 24, No. 4, p. 319 - 334 (2006)
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Astrophysics, M51, Review, Ngc 5195, Observations, Simulations
Scientific paper
The M51 system consists of a grand-design spiral galaxy and a relatively large close companion, NGC 5195. Because M51 (=NGC 5194) is nearby and nearly face-on to us, its structure can be observed in great detail and with a minimum of obscuration from dust. As a result, this galaxy has been thoroughly observed at wavelengths from radio to X-ray. Due to the rich archive of observational data, its structure, dynamical process, star formation mechanism and some other important properties have been analyzed by many authors. In the center of M51, there is a Seyfert 2 or LINER type AGN which radius is 100 pc. The mass within 70 pc in the center is (4~7)×106 Msun, this indicates there may be a black hole there. The disk of M51 can be divided into two parts, the inner disk around the nucleus cuts off at 1350 pc, from this radius to 10 kpc is the outer disk. In contrast, the companion, NGC 5195 is small and faint, and heavy dust from the arm of M51 in the foreground obscures its optical radiation. M51 has many interesting properties different from other normal galaxies, such as the wide open spiral arm, the long HI tidal tail and the huge distorted gas ring around the outer disk, these may be related to the interaction effects. Actually, the dynamical modeling history of M51 is long, in the early stage of astronomical numerical simulation, Toomre & Toomre have given a simple simulation of M51 to study its tidal effect. In 1990, the discovery of M51's long HI tidal tail made the astrophysicists shift the preferred collision time of M51 and NGC 5195 to somewhat later times in order to give the tail more time to develop. More recently, Salo and Laurikainen suggested that a multiple-passage model might be more appropriate for the system, such a scenario appears to do a better job of explaining NGC 5194's HI velocity field, but the predicted structure of the HI tidal tail is more complex than its observation. In this paper, the authers review literature of multi-wavelength observations and recent research results of M51, discuss the improvements and drawbacks of its simulation results and also summarize the available observations of NGC 5195.
Chen Zhu
Williams Peter
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