Tidal debris from high-velocity collisions as fake dark galaxies: A numerical model of VirgoHI21

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through numerical modeling that faint, starless HI clouds like VirgoHI21 can originate from high-velocity tidal debris, challenging the dark matter halo interpretation of such objects.

Contribution

The study provides a numerical model showing that high-speed galaxy collisions can produce HI features resembling dark galaxies, without requiring dark matter halos.

Findings

Tidal debris can mimic dark galaxy properties in HI surveys.

Reversal of velocity gradients can result from streaming motions and projection effects.

High-speed collisions can produce long-lived, starless HI tails.

Abstract

High speed collisions, although current in clusters of galaxies, have long been neglected, as they are believed to cause little damages to galaxies, except when they are repeated, a process called harassment. In fact, they are able to produce faint but extended gaseous tails. Such low-mass, starless, tidal debris may become detached and appear as free floating clouds in the very deep HI surveys that are currently being carried out. We show in this paper that these debris possess the same apparent properties as the so-called "Dark Galaxies", objects originally detected in HI, with no optical counterpart, and presumably dark matter dominated. We present a numerical model of the prototype of such Dark Galaxies - VirgoHI21 -, that is able to reproduce its main characteristics: the one-sided tail linking it to the spiral galaxy NGC 4254, the absence of stars, and above all the reversal of the velocity gradient along the tail originally attributed to rotation motions caused by a massive dark matter halo and which we find to be consistent with simple streaming motions plus projection effects. According to our numerical simulations, this tidal debris was expelled 750 Myr ago during a fly-by at 1100 km/s of NGC 4254 by a massive companion which should now lie at a projected distance of about 400 kpc. A candidate for the intruder is discussed. The existence of galaxies that have never been able to form stars had already been challenged based on theoretical and observational grounds. Tidal collisions, in particular those occurring at high speed, provide a much more simple explanation for the origin of such putative Dark Galaxies.