The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey VII: A Neutral Hydrogen Cloud Complex in the Virgo Cluster

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery and analysis of a complex of five neutral hydrogen clouds in the Virgo cluster, using ALFALFA survey data and VLA follow-up, exploring their origins and dynamics.

Contribution

It provides detailed observations and analysis of a new HI cloud complex in Virgo, including high-resolution imaging and scenario evaluation for its origin.

Findings

The complex consists of five HI clouds with a total mass of 5.1 x 10^8 Msun.

VLA follow-up reveals no symmetry or ordered motions in two resolved clouds.

The most likely origin is gas stripped from NGC 4445 over 0.5 Gyr ago.

Abstract

We present observations of an HI cloud complex most likely located in the Virgo galaxy cluster, first reported by Kent et al. (2007). The complex consists of five clouds, detected in the data set of the ALFALFA extragalactic HI survey at Arecibo. The clouds have radial velocities between cz~480 and 610 km/s. At the Virgo cluster distance, they are spread over a projected span of 170 kpc and have HI masses ranging from 0.48 to 1.7 x 10^8 Msun. The overall HI mass of the complex is 5.1 x 10^8 Msun. The clouds' velocity widths vary between 50 and 250 km/s. New results of follow-up aperture synthesis observations conducted with the Very Large Array are also presented, which yield a higher resolution view of two of the clouds in the complex. These two resolved clouds show no evidence of symmetry in the gas distribution or of any ordered motions. The possibility that the complex is a group of primordial objects, embedded in their own dark matter halo is thought to be unlikely. Scenarios in which the clouds have been removed from the disk of a galaxy traveling at high speed through the intracluster medium are considered. The most likely among those is thought to be one where the clouds were separated from NGC 4445 at a time >0.5 Gyr ago. The orbital velocity of the clouds and the putative parent galaxy would now be seen at a relatively large angle with respect to the line of sight.