In this paper we present the H I morphology and kinematics of the brightest spirals in Coma. We compare the H I morphology with numerical simulations on ram pressure stripping by the ICM. We derive star formation rates for a sample of post starburst and actively star forming galaxies, from deep continuum imaging obtained as a byproduct of the H I observations. We conclude that the H I morphology of the spirals in Coma, the location of the H I deficient galaxies and the size of the H I disks are consistent with predictions of the effect of ram pressure stripping by the ICM.
Targeted observations of 11 of the 14 known PSB galaxies in Coma give
H I upper limits between 3 and
in H I. The star
formation rates derived from (upper limits to) the radio continuum are less
than 1
yr-1. Even the early type galaxies with abnormal emission lines
(SB galaxies from Caldwell et al.) have SFR well below 1
yr-1. Thus in
Coma there is no evidence for the presence of the dust enshrouded starburst
galaxies, which may have been found in clusters at intermediate redshift. We
found additional observational evidence confirming a real difference between cluster and
field post starbursts; galaxies in clusters would exhaust the gas after the
starburst, something that is not always observed in the field.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to E. Brinks for helping to improve this paper significantly. HBA thanks the DAEC of the Observatoire de Paris, the Astronomy Department of Columbia University, and the AOC of the NRAO, for support and hospitality during his visits. We used the Digital Sky Survey, produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We have made use of the Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database (LEDA) supplied by the LEDA team at the CRAL-Observatoire de Lyon (France). We used NED, the NASA/IPAC extragalactic database, operated for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech. This work has in part been supported by NSF grant AST-97-17177 to Columbia University. We appreciate the suggestions done by an anonymous referee and the efficiency with which this paper passed through the whole evaluation procedure.
Copyright ESO 2001