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B.G. Elmegreen (IBM), D.M. Elmegreen (Vassar), M. Kaufman (Ohio State), E. Brinks (U. Guanajuato MX), C. Struck (Iowa State), M. Thomasson (Onsala Obs.), M. Klaric (Columbia, SC), Z. Levay, H.E. Bond, C.A. Christian, J. English, L. Frattare, F. Hamilton, K. Noll (STScI)
The Hubble Heritage Project has the aim of providing the public with pictorially striking images of celestial objects obtained with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The Heritage team has made a 3-color mosaic of the interacting spiral galaxies IC 2163 and NGC 2207 from three pointings of the WFPC2 camera in UBVI passbands. The scientific investigators for this research (Elmegreen, et al. 1995, ApJ, 453, 100 and 139) previously determined that IC 2163 experienced a close, prograde, in-plane encounter with NGC 2207. Tidal forces compressed and elongated the disk of IC 2163, forming an oval ridge of star formation where the perturbed gas reached its innermost extent. The Hubble Heritage image now shows how accelerated gas flowing away from this ridge developed a peculiar structure characterized by thin parallel dust filaments transverse to the direction of the flow. The filaments thicken as the gas approaches the tidal arm, eventually forming two long thick dust lanes in the arm. A spiral arm in NGC 2207 that is backlit by IC 2163 shows similar filamentary shock structures, which in this case are presumably from the associated density wave. Blue clusters of star formation are forming inside numerous clumps along both sets of filaments. A strong radio continuum source in NGC 2207 is also now seen to be associated with a large region of star formation on a spiral arm.
Support for this work was provided by NASA through grant numbers GO-06483-95A and GO-07632.01-96A from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: bge@watson.ibm.com