Star Formation and Gas Accretion in Nearby Galaxies

We Investigate dust stripping of Virgo cluster galaxies that are known to suffer HI gas stripping. The gas stripping phenomena of these galaxies may result from either ram pressure induced by the hot intracluster medium or gravitational tidal interactions between galaxies. While much efforts have been made to directly detect gas removed from cluster galaxies, the spatial distributions of dust, which should also be affected, are hardly known. Several previous studies have tried to directly detect the morphology of gas or dust using radio or infrared observations, but such approaches are hard to widely apply because of the limit of observational resolution and sensitivity. In this study, we try a different approach using optical data: measuring the background galaxy reddening by the dust stripped from the Virgo cluster members. Based on optical color excess maps of the background galaxies, we compare the ambient dust distribution with the HI morphology of the Virgo galaxies. We discuss how efficiently dust stripping can be detected with this method and how the stripped dust is associated with the removed gas according to HI gas stripping stage over the sample.