Seminar
The rich population of jellyfish galaxies in Abell 901/2 at z ~ 0.165

Abstract

The bimodal distribution of red and blue galaxies can often be linked through a quenching mechanism that can attenuate the active star forming galaxies into passive ones. Both environment and the stellar mass play an important role in this transition. The ram pressure stripping (RPS) is an important environmental mechanism in dense environments that can severely change the properties and morphology of galaxies. The most extreme cases of galaxies undergoing RPS are known as jellyfish galaxies. Studying this transitioning piece is crucial to improve our understanding of the evolutionary path of galaxies and how quenching succeeds in galaxy clusters. However, jellyfish galaxies are not well characterised morphologically and finding them is still a complex task based mainly on visual inspection. We present the results of a comprehensive study on the properties of a large sample of jellyfish candidates in the multi-cluster system A901/2. We find evidence that the multi-cluster is triggering the effects of RPS in preferential regions in the system and that these galaxies show an enhancement in their star formation rates. We also use the software Morfometryka in order to analyse the unique morphometric features in jellyfish galaxies providing a better comprehension of their physical state and future. This can help unravel the physical processes behind such extreme morphologies as well as helping to automatise the search for jellyfish galaxy candidates in large surveys.