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Published July 20, 2017 | Published
Journal Article Open

The Extended Baryonic Halo of NGC 3923

Abstract

Galaxy halos and their globular cluster systems build up over time by the accretion of small satellites. We can learn about this process in detail by observing systems with ongoing accretion events and comparing the data with simulations. Elliptical shell galaxies are systems that are thought to be due to ongoing or recent minor mergers. We present preliminary results of an investigation of the baryonic halo—light profile, globular clusters, and shells/streams—of the shell galaxy NGC 3923 from deep Dark Energy Camera (DECam) g and i-band imaging. We present the 2D and radial distributions of the globular cluster candidates out to a projected radius of about 185 kpc, or ∼37R_e , making this one of the most extended cluster systems studied. The total number of clusters implies a halo mass of M_h ~ 3 × 10^(13) M_⊙ . Previous studies had identified between 22 and 42 shells, making NGC 3923 the system with the largest number of shells. We identify 23 strong shells and 11 that are uncertain. Future work will measure the halo mass and mass profile from the radial distributions of the shell, N-body models, and line-of-sight velocity distribution (LOSVD) measurements of the shells using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE).

Additional Information

© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Received: 1 July 2017; Accepted: 14 July 2017; Published: 20 July 2017. Based on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO Prop. ID: 2015A-0630; PI: T. Puzia), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the DOE and NSF (USA), MISE (Spain), STFC (UK), HEFCE (UK), NCSA (UIUC), KICP (U. Chicago), CCAPP (Ohio State), MIFPA (Texas A&M), CNPQ, FAPERJ, FINEP (Brazil), MINECO (Spain), DFG (Germany) and the collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey, which are Argonne Lab, UC Santa Cruz, University of Cambridge, CIEMAT-Madrid, University of Chicago, University College London, DES-Brazil Consortium, University of Edinburgh, ETH Zürich, Fermilab, University of Illinois, ICE (IEEC-CSIC), IFAE Barcelona, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, LMU München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, University of Michigan, NOAO, University of Nottingham, Ohio State University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Lab, Stanford University, University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy [25]. Author Contributions: B.W.M. and T.H.P. conceived and designed the experiment. B.W.M. wrote this paper. T.A. reduced the data and performed the detection and photometry of the GCs and shells. S.S.M., J.C.M., M.A.T., and M.S. assisted with the observing strategy, data reduction, and analysis. R.E.S., G.N.C., and R.S. provided simulations and theoretical analysis of the shells. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Additional details

Created:
August 21, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023