Dust Deficiency in the Interacting Galaxy NGC 3077

TL;DR

This study uses Herschel PACS 70 μm observations to compare dust content in the interacting galaxy NGC 3077 with isolated galaxies, revealing NGC 3077's dust deficiency likely caused by tidal interactions.

Contribution

First detailed comparison of dust content in NGC 3077 with isolated galaxies using Herschel data, highlighting dust and gas deficiency due to tidal interactions.

Findings

NGC 3077 has about 10 times less dust than isolated galaxies.

NGC 3077's dust-to-gas ratio is significantly higher than that of isolated galaxies.

Gas appears to be stripped more efficiently than dust in NGC 3077.

Abstract

Using 70 $\mu$ m observations taken with the PACS instrument of the Herschel space telescope, the dust content of the nearby and interacting spiral galaxy NGC 3077 has been compared with the dust content of the isolated galaxies such as NGC 2841, NGC 3184 and NGC 3351. The dust content has allowed us to derive dust-to-gas ratios for the four spiral galaxies of our sample. We find that NGC 2841, NGC 3184 and NGC 3351 have dust masses of 6.5-9.1 $\times$ 10$^7$ M$\odot$, which are a factor of $\sim$10 higher than the value found for NGC 3077. This result shows that NGC 3077 is a dust deficient galaxy, as was expected, because this galaxy is affected by tidal interactions with its neighboring galaxies M81 and M82. NGC 3077 reveals a dust-to-gas ratio of 17.5%, much higher than the average ratio of 1.8% of the isolated galaxies, evidencing that NGC 3077 is also deficient in H$_2$+HI gas. Therefore, it seems that, in this galaxy, gas has been stripped more efficiently than dust.