Environment, Ram Pressure, and Shell Formation in Holmberg II
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neutral hydrogen VLA D-array observations of the dwarf irregular galaxy HoII, a prototype galaxy for studies of shell formation, are presented. These were extracted from the multiconfiguration data set of Puche and colleagues. H I is detected to radii over 16' or 4 R 25 , almost a factor of 2 better than previous studies. The total H I mass M = 6.44 × 10 8 M ⊙ . The integrated H I map has a comet-like appearance, with a large but faint component extending to the northwest and the H I appearing compressed on the opposite side. This suggests that HoII is affected by ram pressure from an intragroup medium (IGM). The velocity field shows a clear rotating disk pattern, and a rotation curve corrected for asymmetric drift was derived. However, the gas at large radii may not be in equilibrium. Puche and colleagues' multiconfiguration data were also reanalyzed, and it is shown that they overestimated their fluxes by over 20%. The rotation curve derived for HoII is well defined for r ≲ 10 kpc. For 10 ≲ r ≲ 18 kpc, however, velocities are only defined on the approaching side, such that this part of the rotation curve should be used with caution. An analysis of the mass distribution, using the whole extent of this rotation curve, yields a total mass of 6.3 × 10 9 M ⊙ , of which ≈80% is dark. Similarly to what is seen in many dwarfs, there is more luminous mass in H I than in stars. One peculiarity, however, is that luminous matter dominates within the optical body of the galaxy and dark matter only in the outer parts, analogous to what is seen in massive spirals rather than dwarfs. HoII lies northeast of the M81 Group's core, along with Kar 52 (M81 dwarf A) and UGC 4483. No signs of interaction are observed, however, and it is argued that HoII is part of the NGC 2403 subgroup, infalling toward M81. A case is made for ram pressure stripping and an IGM in the M81 Group. Stripping of the outer parts of the disk would require an IGM density n IGM ≳ 4.0 × 10 -6 atoms cm -3 at the location of HoII. This corresponds to ∼1% of the virial mass of the group uniformly distributed over a volume just enclosing HoII and is consistent with the known X-ray properties of small groups. The H I tail is consistent with additional turbulent viscous stripping and evaporation, at least for low IGM temperatures. It is argued that existing observations of HoII do not support self-propagating star formation scenarios, whereby the H I holes and shells are created by supernova explosions and stellar winds. Many H I holes are located in low surface density regions of the disk, where no star formation is expected or observed. Alternative mechanisms are discussed, and it is suggested that ram pressure can help. Ram pressure has the capacity to enlarge preexisting holes and lower their creation energies, helping to bridge the gap between the observed star formation rate and that required to create the holes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".