| 16th of February 2021 |
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| A blind ATCA HI survey of the Fornax galaxy cluster |
| by Loni et al. |
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Loni et al. present the first interferometric blind HI survey covering
an area of 15 square degrees, of the Fornax galaxy cluster. The
Fornax cluster is a low mass cluster (~7×10^13 solar masses), located
in the southern sky at a distance of 20 Mpc (160 million light years),
making it the second closest galaxy cluster to us after the Virgo
cluster. Loni et al. detected neutral hydrogen emission from 16
galaxies out of 200 spectroscopically confirmed Fornax cluster
members. Half of these galaxies exhibit a
disturbed HI morphology, including several cases of asymmetries,
tails, offsets between HI and optical centres, and a case of a
truncated HI disc suggesting that they have been interacting within or
on their way to Fornax.
The images above show ATCA HI contours overlaid on an optical image for three HI detections. In each panel the 3σ column density sensitivity (values reported in the top right corner) is shown with white colour, while cyan contours represent steps of 3n from it (n = 0, 1, 2, ...). The PSF is shown on the bottom-left corner of each panel, and a 5 kpc scale bar in the bottom-right corner. The results are presented in a paper submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics. |