Structure and kinematics of the polar ring galaxies: new observations and estimation of the dark halo shape

TL;DR

This paper presents new observational data and analysis of polar ring galaxies to understand their structure, kinematics, and the shape of their dark matter halos, addressing key open questions in their formation and properties.

Contribution

It provides detailed morphological, photometric, and kinematic data for PRGs, and estimates dark halo shapes using spectral observations, expanding the understanding of these peculiar systems.

Findings

Dark matter halos in PRGs are often flattened.

Polar structures likely formed by accretion from intergalactic filaments.

New catalog significantly increases known PRGs.

Abstract

The polar ring galaxies (PRGs) represent an interesting type of peculiar systems in which the outer matter is rotating in the plane which is roughly perpendicular to the disk of the main galaxy. Despite the long lasting study of the PRGs there is a lack of the detailed enough observational data, there are still many open questions. Among the most interesting issues there are the estimate of the flattening of the dark matter halos in these systems and the verification of the assumption that the most massive polar structures were formed by the accretion of the matter from the intergalactic filaments. The new catalog recently collected by our team using the SDSS images increased by several times the number of known PRGs. The current paper gives the overview of our latest results on the study of morphological and photometric structure of the PRGs. Using the stellar and ionized gas kinematics data based on spectral observations with the Russian 6-m telescope we estimate the dark matter halo shape in the individual galaxies.