The Kennicutt-Schmidt relation of the ram pressure stripped gas

  • Published : 2017.10.10

Abstract

Ram pressure due to the intracluster medium (ICM) is known to play a crucial role in removing the cool gas content of a galaxy on a short timescale, potentially driving a star forming galaxy to evolve into a red passive population. Although many HI imaging studies find clear evidence of diffuse atomic gas stripping from cluster galaxies, it is still debatable whether the ram pressure can also strip dense molecular gas. NGC 4522, a Virgo spiral, undergoing strong ram pressure stripping, is one of the few cases where extraplanar CO emission together with stripped HI gas and $H{\alpha}$ knots has been identified, providing an ideal laboratory to study the molecular gas stripping event and the extraplanar star formation activity. The aim of this work is to investigate the origin of extraplanar molecular clouds near NGC 4522 (e.g. stripped or forming in situ), and to probe a relation between the molecular gas surface density and the star formation rate (i.e. the Kennicutt-Schmidt law) at sub-kpc scale, especially in the extraplanar space, using ALMA Cycle 3 CO data and $H{\alpha}$ data of NGC 4522. We present the results from our ALMA observations, and discuss possible scenarios for the origin of extraplanar molecular clouds and to characterize the star formation activity associated with stripped gas outside the galactic disk.

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