Wednesday 17 November at 3:30pm

Martin Haas - MPI Heidelberg

"The cold dust concentrations in the colliding galaxies NGC4038/39"

ABSTRACT: "NGC4038/39 (Arp244) is the prototype of an interacting system with spectacular tidal tails, "The Antennae". SCUBA imaging at 450 and 850 micron, supplemented by 60 and 100 micron maps with ISO, impressively show that in this colliding galaxy pair the dust is accumulated not only in the two nuclei, but also strongly concentrated in giant cloud complexes in the overlap region of the galaxy disks. Interestingly, there are two types of dust concentrations: type one has, in addition to the cold dust, significant amounts of warm dust heated by strong starbursts, and type two is purely cold (to very cold) and does not yet show any signature of starbursts. For colliding galaxies which attracted attention due to their activity, this represents the first observation of clouds in a prestarburst phase."