Gas kinematics and star formation in NGC 6822

  • Park, Hye-Jin (Department of Astronomy and Space Science, Sejong University) ;
  • Oh, Se-Heon (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Sejong University) ;
  • Wang, Jing (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics(KIAA), Peking University) ;
  • Zheng, Yun (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics(KIAA), Peking University) ;
  • Zhang, Hong-Xin (Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, Department of Astronomy, University of Science and Technology of China) ;
  • de Blok, W.J.G. (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON))
  • 발행 : 2020.10.13

초록

We present H I gas kinematics and star formation activities of NGC 6822, a dwarf galaxy located in the Local Volume at a distance of ~490 kpc. We perform profile decomposition of the line-of-sight velocity profiles of the high-resolution (~42.4" × 12") spatial; ~1.6 km/s spectral) H I data cube taken with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). For this, we use a new tool, the so-called BAYGAUD (BAYesian GAUssian Decompositor) which is based on Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques, allowing us to decompose a line-of-sight velocity profile into an optimal number of Gaussian components in a quantitative manner. We classify the decomposed H I gas components of NGC 6822 into kinematically cold, warm or hot ones with respect to their velocity dispersion: 1) cold: < 4 km/s, 2) warm: 4 ~ 8 km/s, 3) hot: > 8 km/s. We then derive the Toomre-Q parameters of NGC 6822 using the kinematically decomposed H I gas maps. We also correlate their gas surface densities with the surface star formation rates derived using both GALEX far-ultraviolet and WISE 22 micron data to examine the impact of gas turbulence caused by stellar feedback on the Kennicutt-Schmidt (K-S) law. The kinematically cold component is likely to better follow the linear extension of the Kennicutt-Schmidt (K-S) law for molecular hydrogen (H2) at the low gas surface density regime where H I is not saturated.

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