Study inspects the ultra-thin galaxy UGC 11859

Utilizing the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), astronomers have carried out optical imaging observations of an remoted ultra-thin galaxy generally known as UGC 11859. Outcomes of the observational marketing campaign, printed July 12 in The Astrophysical Journal, ship necessary insights in regards to the construction and properties of this galaxy.

Positioned some 167.5 million gentle years away, UGC 11859 is a comparatively remoted edge-on ultra-thin galaxy. Though the galaxy is remoted, it showcases a comparatively excessive asymmetry index within the impartial atomic hydrogen (HI) profile, which factors to potential invisible interactions with the medium at low floor brightness.

Edge-on remoted galaxies like UGC 11859, as a result of their projected orientation, are wonderful targets to review the three-dimensional buildings of galaxies together with warps and flares, and to research potential sources of such distortions. That’s the reason a staff of astronomers led by Luis Ossa-Fuentes of the College of Valparaíso in Chile, determined to look at UGC 11859 with GTC’s OSIRIS digital camera in an effort to seek for distortions.

“The observations had been made utilizing the OSIRIS digital camera with SDSS g and r wavelength filters in an effort to maximize the transmission of the environment and filter system. The sector of view was ample to concurrently map the stellar disk and its potential low floor brightness exterior buildings,” the researchers defined.

The observations discovered that the disk of UGC 11859 reveals a big gravitational distortion. The pictures, each in g and r bands, present the presence of a warp at one aspect of the stellar disk. The warp seems at a radius the place the floor brightness has fallen to low values.

The galactic plane on either side of the middle of UGC 11859 shows growing scale top with growing galactocentric radius, which suggests the presence of a flare within the stellar distribution. Furthermore, the radial floor brightness profile of the disk showcases a transparent break and a pointy fall at a galactocentric radius of about 78,000 light years, indicating an edge-on truncation.

The astronomers famous that the existence of a warp and a flare within the outer disk of UGC 11859, coincidentally with a break within the floor brightness profile, poses the query of whether or not the phenomena may very well be associated.

“The presence of this flare helps the suggestion that edge-on disk truncations could be produced by the mixture of a flare with the down-bending profile of a standard Kind II disk,” the authors of the paper concluded.

The research additionally detected a potential small satellite galaxy past the warped aspect of UGC 11859’s disk inside a small angular distance. This faint satellite acquired designation GTC-1 and its associations with UGC 11859 must be confirmed by spectroscopic observations.

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