* Astronomy

Title: Discovery of a giant HI tail in the galaxy group HCG 44
Authors: Paolo Serra, Baerbel Koribalski, Pierre-Alain Duc, Tom Oosterloo, Richard M. McDermid, Leo Michel-Dansac, Eric Emsellem, Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Katherine Alatalo, Leo Blitz, Maxime Bois, Frederic Bournaud, Martin Bureau, Michele Cappellari, Alison F. Crocker, Roger L. Davies, Timothy A. Davis, P. T. de Zeeuw, Sadegh Khochfar, Davor Krajnovic, Harald Kuntschner, Pierre-Yves Lablanche, Raffaella Morganti, Thorsten Naab, Marc Sarzi, Nicholas Scott, Anne-Marie Weijmans, Lisa M. Young

We report the discovery of a giant HI tail in the intra-group medium of HCG 44 as part of the Atlas3D survey. The tail is ~300 kpc long in projection and contains ~5x10^8 solar masses of HI. We detect no diffuse stellar light at the location of the tail down to ~28.5 mag/arcsec^2 in g band. We speculate that the tail might have formed as gas was stripped from the outer regions of NGC 3187 (a member of HCG 44) by the group tidal field. In this case, a simple model indicates that about 1/3 of the galaxy's HI was stripped during a time interval of <1 Gyr. Alternatively, the tail may be the remnant of an interaction between HCG 44 and NGC 3162, a spiral galaxy now ~650 kpc away from the group. Regardless of the precise formation mechanism, the detected HI tail shows for the first time direct evidence of gas stripping in HCG 44. It also highlights that deep HI observations over a large field are needed to gather a complete census of this kind of events in the local Universe.

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