The origin of H I-deficiency in galaxies on the outskirts of the Virgo cluster. II. Companions and uncertainties in distances and deficiencies

International audienceThe origin of the deficiency in neutral hydrogen of 13 spiral galaxies lying in the outskirts of the Virgo cluster is reassessed. If these galaxies have passed through the core of the cluster, their interstellar gas should have been lost through ram pressure stripping by the hot X-ray emitting gas of the cluster. We analyze the positions of these H I-deficient and other spiral galaxies in velocity-distance plots, in which we include our compilation of velocity-distance data on 61 elliptical galaxies, and compare with simulated velocity-distance diagrams obtained from cosmological N-body simulations. We find that ˜20% relative Tully-Fisher distance errors are consistent with the great majority of the spirals, except for a small number of objects whose positions in the velocity-distance diagram suggest grossly incorrect distances, implying that the Tully-Fisher error distribution function has non-Gaussian wings. Moreover, we find that the distance errors may lead to an incorrect fitting of the Tolman-Bondi solution that can generate significant errors in the distance and especially the mass estimates of the cluster. We suggest 4 possibilities for the outlying H I-deficient spirals (in decreasing frequency): 1) they have large relative distance errors and are in fact close enough (at distances between 12.7 and 20.9 Mpc from us) to the cluster to have passed through its core and seen their gas removed by ram pressure stripping; 2) their gas is converted to stars by tidal interactions with other galaxies; 3) their gas is heated during recent mergers with smaller galaxies; and 4) they are not truly H I-deficient (e.g. S0/a misclassified as Sa)