Aperture Synthesis Observations of the Nearby Spiral NGC 6503: Modeling the Thin and Thick HI Disks

TL;DR

This study uses high-quality aperture synthesis HI observations of NGC 6503 to model its complex gas disk structure, revealing a thin disk with a slower-rotating thick layer likely due to star formation activity.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed model of the galaxy's HI disk comprising a thin and a slow-rotating thick layer, based on improved interferometric imaging techniques.

Findings

HI distribution extends to about 23 kpc, similar to the optical disk.

The HI velocity field shows regularity with some irregularities.

Presence of a slow-rotating thick HI layer suggests star formation influences extra-planar gas.

Abstract

We present sensitive aperture synthesis observations of the nearby, late-type spiral galaxy NGC 6503, and produce HI maps of considerably higher quality than previous observations by van Moorsel & Wells (1985). We find that the velocity field, while remarkably regular, contains clear evidence for irregularities. The HI is distributed over an area much larger than the optical image of the galaxy, with spiral features in the outer parts and localized holes within the HI distribution. The absence of absorption towards the nearby quasar 1748+700 yields an upper limit of 5 10^{17} cm^{-2} for the column density of cold HI gas along a line of sight which should intersect the disk at a radius of 29 kpc. This suggests that the radial extent of the HI disk is not much larger than that which we trace in HI emission (23 kpc). The observed HI distribution is inconsistent with models of a single thin or thick disk. Instead, the data require a model containing a thin disk plus a thicker low column-density HI layer that rotates more slowly than the thin disk and that extends only to approximately the optical radius. This suggests that the presence of extra-planar gas in this galaxy is largely the result of star formation in the disk rather than cold gas accretion. Improved techniques for interferometric imaging including multi-scale Clean that were used in this work are also described.