AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 127. Interstellar Medium: Hot and Cold
Oral, Thursday, January 9, 2003, 10:00-11:30am, 606-607

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[127.04] Hot Gas Halos in Elliptical Galaxies with Large Scale Dust Lanes

D.J. Horner, P. Goudfrooij (STScI)

We have used XMM to observe several luminous, old elliptical galaxies containing large, regular dust lanes for which the settling time scale is several Gyr. If such galaxies contain massive halos of hot (T ~< 1 keV) gas, the theory of grain sputtering in hot gas would likely need revision, as it predicts grain life times that are tiny relative to the age of the large dust lanes. On the other hand, a lack of hot gas would mean that these very luminous ellipticals are not able to retain the gas produced by stellar evolution. The implication would be that in order for an elliptical to retain its stellar mass loss, it would have to be located in a potential well that is deeper than that of the galaxy itself (e.g., in centers of (sub-)clusters or rich groups). We will present the results of our analysis of the XMM data and discuss the implications.


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