Detalles de publicación

PP 020031

The Tucana dwarf spheroidal galaxy: not such a massive failure after all

S. Taibi (1, 2), G. Battaglia (1, 2), M. Rejkuba (3), R. Leaman (4), N. Kacharov (4), G. Iorio (5), P. Jablonka (6, 7), M. Zoccali (8, 9)
(1) Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, C/Via Lactea s/n, E-38205, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain (2) Departamento de Astrofisica, Universidad de La Laguna, E-38205, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain (3) European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild Strasse 2, D-85748 Garching, Germany (4) Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Königstuhl 17, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany (5) Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia "G. Galilei", Università di Padova, vicolo dell'Osservatorio 3, 35122 PD, Italy (6) Institute of Physics, Laboratory of Astrophysics, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1290 Sauverny, Switzerland (7) GEPI, CNRS UMR 8111, Observatoire de Paris, PSL Research University, F-92125, Meudon, Cedex, France (8) Instituto de Astrofisica, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, 782-0436 Macul, Santiago, Chile (9) Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, 782-0436 Macul, Santiago, Chile
Isolated Local Group (LG) dwarf galaxies have evolved most or all of their life unaffected by interactions with the large LG spirals and therefore offer the opportunity to learn about the intrinsic characteristics of this class of objects. Here we explore the internal kinematic and metallicity properties of one of the three isolated LG dwarf spheroidal galaxies, i.e. the Tucana dSph. This is an intriguing system, as it has been found in the literature to have an internal rotation of up to 16 km/s, a much higher velocity dispersion than other dSphs of similar luminosity, and a possible exception to the too-big-too-fail problem. We present results for a new VLT/FORS2 spectroscopic dataset in the CaII triplet region for 50 candidate red giant branch stars in the direction of Tucana, which yielded line-of-sight velocity and metallicity ([Fe/H]) measurements of 39 effective members. This doubles the number of Tucana's stars with such measurements. In addition, we re-reduce and include in our analysis the other two spectroscopic datasets presented in the literature, the VLT/FORS2 sample by Fraternali et al. (2009) and the VLT/FLAMES one by Gregory et al. (2019). We measure a systemic velocity of $180.0\pm1.3$ km/s, consistently across the various datasets analyzed, and find that a dispersion-only model is moderately favored over models accounting also for internal rotation. Our best estimate of the internal velocity dispersion is $6.2_{-1.3}^{+1.6}$ km/s, much smaller than the values reported in the literature and in line with similarly luminous dSphs; this is consistent with Tucana not being an exception to the too-big-to-fail problem, nor living in a dark matter halo much more massive than those of its siblings. As for the metallicity properties, we do not find anything unusual; there are hints of the presence of a [Fe/H] gradient but more data are needed to pin its presence down.

 
Aceptado para publicación en A&A | Enviado el 2020-02-03 | Proyecto P/301204