The Sharpest Ultraviolet view of the star formation in an extreme environment of the nearest Jellyfish Galaxy IC 3418

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution ultraviolet imaging to analyze star formation in the turbulent wake of the Jellyfish galaxy IC 3418, revealing detailed structures and a trend of increasing star formation rate with distance from the galaxy.

Contribution

It provides the first resolution of star forming clumps into sub-clumps and individual stars, and proposes a new dynamical model for star formation in stripped gas.

Findings

Resolved star forming clumps into sub-clumps and stars.

Detected increasing star formation rate with distance from the galaxy.

Suggested vortex street formation as a mechanism for star formation.

Abstract

We present the far ultraviolet (FUV) imaging of the nearest Jellyfish or Fireball galaxy IC3418/VCC 1217, in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, using Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) onboard the ASTROSAT satellite. The young star formation observed here in the 17 kpc long turbulent wake of IC3418, due to ram pressure stripping of cold gas surrounded by hot intra-cluster medium, is a unique laboratory that is unavailable in the Milkyway. We have tried to resolve star forming clumps, seen compact to GALEX UV images, using better resolution available with the UVIT and incorporated UV-optical images from Hubble Space Telescope archive. For the first time, we resolve the compact star forming clumps (fireballs) into sub-clumps and subsequently into a possibly dozen isolated stars. We speculate that many of them could be blue supergiant stars which are cousins of SDSS J122952.66+112227.8, the farthest star (~17 Mpc) we had found earlier surrounding one of these compact clumps. We found evidence of star formation rate (4 - 7.4 x 10^-4 M_sun per yr ) in these fireballs, estimated from UVIT flux densities, to be increasing with the distance from the parent galaxy. We propose a new dynamical model in which the stripped gas may be developing vortex street where the vortices grow to compact star forming clumps due to self-gravity. Gravity winning over turbulent force with time or length along the trail can explain the puzzling trend of higher star formation rate and bluer/younger stars observed in fireballs farther away from the parent galaxy.