Galaxies at the extremes: Ultra-diffuse galaxies in the Virgo Cluster

Understand

We report the discovery of three large (R29 >~ 1 arcminute) extremely low surface brightness (mu_(V,0) ~ 27.0) galaxies identified using our deep, wide-field imaging of the Virgo Cluster from the Burrell Schmidt telescope.

• Complementary data from the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey do not resolve red giant branch stars in these objects down to i=24, yielding a lower distance limit of 2.5 Mpc.
• At the Virgo distance, these objects have half-light radii 3-10 kpc and luminosities L_V=2-9x10^7 Lsun.
• These galaxies are comparable in size but lower in surface brightness than the large ultradiffuse LSB galaxies recently identified in the Coma cluster, and are located well within Virgo's virial radius; two are projected directly on the cluster core.