Smoke in the "Smoke Rings'': ISO Observations of Dust in Collisional Ring Galaxies

2000 • 2000LNP...548..232A

Authors • Appleton, Philip N. • Charmandaris, Vassilis • Horellou, Cathy • Mirabel, I. Felix • Laurent, Olivier

Abstract • Collisional ring galaxies probably result from a head-on collision between a compact companion galaxy and a gas-rich disk system. We present a review of the discovery of warm dust in five collisional rings observed by ISO which range in total Far-IR luminosity from 10¹⁰ < L_FIR < 10¹¹ L. The results show that in most cases, the mid-IR (MIR) flux is often a significant fraction of the total energy budget of star formation activity in these galaxies (at least 10% even in the least powerful cases). We argue that the MIR emission, when combined with optical and radio observations, allows us to build a more complete picture of activity in these collisional systems. Although not as extreme as ULIRGs, these collisional systems provide low-redshift examples of the early effects of galaxy collisions on the ISM and may be relevant to the collisional assembly of galaxy disk components at high redshift.

Links

• PREPRINT http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912210
• DATA http://nida.esac.esa.int/nida-cl-web/?ACTION=OBSERVATION&ID=22400702
• DATA http://nida.esac.esa.int/nida-cl-web/?ACTION=OBSERVATION&ID=37300901
• DATA http://nida.esac.esa.int/nida-cl-web/?ACTION=OBSERVATION&ID=77604601
• DATA http://nida.esac.esa.int/nida-cl-web/?ACTION=OBSERVATION&ID=80500287
• DATA http://nida.esac.esa.int/nida-cl-web/?ACTION=OBSERVATION&ID=82401193
• ELECTR http://link.springer.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&issn=1616-6361&volume=548&spage=232
• SPIRES http://inspirehep.net/search?p=find+eprint+astro-ph/9912210