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Saha, Kanak

Publications and source records attributed to Saha, Kanak.

Wobbly discs – corrugations seen in the dust lanes of edge-on galaxies

ABSTRACT We report the detection of small-scale bending waves, also known as corrugations, in the dust lanes of five nearby edge-on disc galaxies. This phenomenon, where the disc mid-plane bends to become wavy, just as in warps but on a smaller scale, is seen here for the first time, in the dust lanes running across the discs. Because they are seen in absorption, this feature must be present in the dust disc in the outskirts of these galaxies. We enhance the visibility of these features using unsharp masking, trace the dust mid-plane across the disc, measure the corrugation amplitude by eye and the corrugation wavelength using Fourier analysis. The corrugation amplitude is found to be in the range of 70–300pc and the wavelengths lie between 1 and 5 kpc. In this limited sample, we find that the amplitude of the corrugations tends to be larger for lower mass galaxies, whereas the wavelength of corrugation does not seem to depend on the mass of host galaxies. Linear stability analysis is performed to find out the dynamical state of these dust discs. Based on WKB analysis, we find that the dust corrugations in about half of our sample are stable. Further analysis, on a larger sample would be useful to strengthen the above results.

Narayan, Chaitra A.↗

Bar rejuvenation in S0 galaxies?

ABSTRACT Based on the colour measurements from a multiband, multicomponent 2D decompositions of S0 and spiral galaxies using SDSS images, we found that bars are bluer in S0 galaxies compared to the spiral galaxies. Most of the S0s in our sample have stellar masses ∼L* galaxies. The environment might have played an important role as most of the S0s with bluer bars are in the intermediate-density environment. The possibility of minor mergers and tidal interactions that occurs frequently in the intermediate-density environment might have caused either a bar to form and/or induce star formation in the barred region of S0 galaxies. The underlying discs show the usual behaviour being redder in S0s compared to spiral galaxies while the bulges are red and old for both S0 and spiral galaxies. The finding of bluer bars in S0 galaxies is a puzzling issue and poses an interesting question at numerical and theoretical studies most of which shows that the bars are long-lived structures with old stellar populations.

Barway, Sudhanshu↗