THE INTERACTING GALAXY PAIR KPG 390: Hα KINEMATICS

In this work, we present scanning Fabry-Perot (FP) Hα observations of the isolated interacting galaxy pair NGC 5278/79 obtained with the PUMA FP interferometer. We derived velocity fields and rotation curves for both galaxies. For NGC 5278 we also obtained the residual velocity map to investigate the non-circular motions, and estimated its mass by fitting the rotation curve with disk+halo components. We test three different types of halos (pseudo-isothermal, Hernquist, and Navarro-Frenk-White) and obtain satisfactory fits to the rotation curve for all profiles. The amount of dark matter required by the pseudo-isothermal profile is about 10 times smaller than that for the other two halo distributions. Finally, our kinematical results together with the analysis of dust lane distribution and of surface brightness profiles along the minor axis allowed us to determine univocally that both components of the interacting pair are trailing spirals.