1308.0728 (Gordon P. Garmire)

X-ray discovery of a dwarf-galaxy galaxy collision    [PDF]

Gordon P. Garmire

We report the discovery of a probable dwarf galaxy colliding with NGC 1232. This collision is visible only in the X-ray spectral band, and it is creating a region of shocked gas with a temperature of 5.8 MK covering an impact area 7.25 kpc in diameter. The X-ray luminosity is 3.7 x1038ergs s-1. The long lifetime of this gas against radiative and adiabatic cooling should permit the use of the luminous afterglow from such collisions to be used as a way of estimating their importance in galaxy evolution.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0728