Abstract
The interstellar medium has long been a familiar feature of nearly normal spiral galaxies while elliptical galaxies, until recently, had been regarded as largely gas free - neither optical nor radio observations indicated significant gas within ellipticals. This mistaken impression has now been corrected by X-ray observations which reveal the presence of 5 × 108 -5 × 1010 M ⊙ of hot (T ~ 107) K gas distributed throughout and beyond the optically bright parts of elliptical galaxies (FORMAN et al. [1], BIERMANN and KRONBERG [2]; NULSEN, STEWART, and FABIAN [3]; FORMAN, JONES, and TUCKER [4]; TRINCHIERI and FABBIANO [5]; CANIZARES, FABBIANO, and TRINCHIERI [6]). This amount of gas is comparable to or greater than that in typical gas-rich spiral galaxies and is consistent with the amount of gas expected to have been ejected from stars since the galaxies formed. For example, the current mass loss rate resulting from stellar evolution in an old population of stars, α * = (dM *//dt)/M * ≈ 2.2 × 10-20 s-1, when combined with the Hubble time, indicates that a fraction a * t H ≈ 0.01 of the stellar mass has been converted to gas; this is comparable to but somewhat less than the observed fraction.
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Loewenstein, M., Mathews, W.G. (1987). Hot Gas Evolution in Nearly Normal Elliptical Galaxies. In: Faber, S.M. (eds) Nearly Normal Galaxies. Santa Cruz Summer Workshops in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4762-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4762-3_13
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