Tidal Streams in NGC 4216, and NGC4222, NGC4206 - all are members of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster

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This image was taken during several nights on April, 2013 in remotely controlled IRIDA Observatory. We used our both telescopes: 12"ASA Astrograph + SBIG 11000M CCD and 12"RC Astrograph + ATIK 4000M CCD to obtain ... hours of total exposure time in LRGB filters.

The three edge-on galaxies NGC4216 (in the center of the image), NGC4222 (top left) and NGC4206 (bottom right) are members of the Virgo galaxy cluster. In the east of NGC4216 one can find a very faint structure, which could be a stellar stream. The edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 4216 is nearly 100 000 light-years across, about the size of our own Milky Way and is about 40 million light-years away.

NGC 4216 is a barred spiral galaxy – it is classified as SAB(s)b in the RC3 cataloge (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991) – located in the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster at an angular distance of 4 degrees from the cluster center, M87. It has an edge-on orientation with an inclination angle i = 85 degree. Its central regions are characterized by a prominent dust lane (Chung et al. 2009) and a red and compact bright nucleus. The galaxy is surrounded by a very diffuse stellar halo, and complex filamentary structures, including streams and plumes.

The most prominent tidal stream F1, East of NGC 4216, has an angular extent of ~12.5 arcmin on the sky, which corresponds to ~60 kpc at the assumed mean distance of the cluster, 16.5 Mpc (Mei et al. 2007). The filament starts from the South-East corner of NGC 4216 and near its easternmost tip it makes a sudden turn towards the West-North with an angle of about 120 degree. Although further away it gets lost within the halo of a bright red star, when it emerges again, it seems to join the F2 the second longest filament in the field, North of NGC 4216.

Briеfly adapted information and figures courtesy:

The Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey. IV. NGC 4216: A Bombarded Spiral in the Virgo Cluster

(Sanjaya Paudel, Pierre-Alain Duc, Patrick Cote, Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Laura Ferrarese, Etienne Ferriere, Stephen D. J. Gwyn, J. Christopher Mihos, Bernd Vollmer, Michael L. Balogh, Ray G. Carlberg, Samuel Boissier, Alessandro Boselli, Patrick R. Durrell, Eric Emsellem, Lauren A. MacArthur, Simona Mei, Leo Michel-Dansac, Wim van Driel)

Object details for NGC 4216

Image details

RC 12"

ASA 12"