Impact of magnetic fields on ram pressure stripping in disk galaxies

TL;DR

This study uses magnetohydrodynamic simulations to show how magnetic fields influence the morphology and properties of gas tails in ram pressure stripped disk galaxies, revealing filamentary structures and bifurcations.

Contribution

First simulation including magnetic fields, radiative cooling, and self-gravity to study their effects on ram pressure stripping in disk galaxies.

Findings

Magnetic fields produce filamentary and bifurcated tails.

Magnetic pressure supports tail filaments aligned with B-fields.

Magnetic draping influences gas stripping rates depending on disk orientation.

Abstract

(abridged) Ram pressure can remove significant amounts of gas from galaxies in clusters, and thus has a large impact on the evolution of cluster galaxies. Recent observations have shown that key properties of ram pressure stripped tails of galaxies are in conflict with predictions by simulations. To increase the realism of existing simulations, we simulated for the first time a disk galaxy exposed to a uniformly magnetized wind including radiative cooling and self-gravity of the gas. We find that B-fields have a strong effect on the morphology of the gas in the tail of the galaxy. While in the pure hydro case the tail is very clumpy, the MHD case shows very filamentary structures in the tail. The filaments can be strongly supported by magnetic pressure and, when this is the case, the B-field vectors tend to be aligned with the filaments. The ram pressure stripping may lead to the formation of magnetized density tails that appear as bifurcated in the plane of the sky and resemble the double tails observed in ESO 137-001 and ESO 137-002. Such tails can be formed under a variety of situations, both for the disks oriented face-on with respect to the ICM wind and for the tilted ones. While this bifurcation is due to the generic tendency for the B-fields to produce very filamentary tail morphology, the tail properties are further shaped by the combination of the B-field orientation and the sliding of the field past the disk surface exposed to the wind. Magnetic draping does not strongly change the rate of gas stripping. For a face-on galaxy, the field tends to reduce the amount of stripping compared to the pure hydro case, and is associated with the formation of a magnetic draping layer on the side of the galaxy exposed to the ICM wind. For significantly tilted disks, the stripping rate may be enhanced by the ``scraping'' of the disk surface by the B-fields sliding past the ISM/ICM interface.