Inflow and outflows in the interacting system NGC 2992/3

Abstract

Whereas it is well known that gas may be driven into the core of merging disks, fueling a central AGN or a nuclear starburst, recent studies have shown that a significant fraction of the stellar/gaseous components is expelled into the intergalactic medium along tidal tails. The tidal debris might be dispersed in the intergalactic/intracluster medium where it adds to the diffuse background light such as that observed in the Coma cluster, might fall back towards the merger, or regroup to form a new generation of galaxies, the so-called tidal dwarf galaxies (TDGs). We illustrate in this paper these various phenomena with a detailed multi-wavelength study of the interacting system NGC 2992/3 (Arp 245).