The RINGS Survey I: Halpha and HI Velocity Maps of Galaxy NGC 2280

TL;DR

This study presents detailed gas velocity maps of galaxy NGC 2280 using Halpha and HI observations, confirming their agreement and providing insights into its mass distribution and gas dynamics.

Contribution

The paper introduces high-resolution velocity maps of NGC 2280 from Halpha and HI data, demonstrating their consistency and detecting anomalous velocities.

Findings

Halpha and HI velocity maps are in excellent agreement.

Minor differences are due to different gas distributions.

Models confirm previous systemic velocity and projection angles.

Abstract

Precise measurements of gas kinematics in the disk of a spiral galaxy can be used to estimate its mass distribution. The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) has a large collecting area and field of view, and is equipped with a Fabry-Perot interferometer that can measure gas kinematics in a galaxy from the Halpha line. To take advantage of this capability, we have constructed a sample of 19 nearby spiral galaxies, the RSS Imaging and Spectroscopy Nearby Galaxy Survey (RINGS), as targets for detailed study of their mass distributions and have collected much of the needed data. In this paper, we present velocity maps produced from Halpha Fabry-Perot interferometry and HI aperture synthesis for one of these galaxies, NGC 2280, and show that the two velocity measurements are generally in excellent agreement. Minor differences can mostly be attributed to the different spatial distributions of the excited and neutral gas in this galaxy, but we do detect some anomalous velocities in our Halpha velocity map of the kind that have previously been detected in other galaxies. Models produced from our two velocity maps agree well with each other and our estimates of the systemic velocity and projection angles confirm previous measurements of these quantities for NGC 2280.