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Vlt/Vimos Observations Of An Occulting Galaxy Pair : Redshifts And Effective Extinction Curve., Benne W. Holwerda, T. Boker, J. J. Dalcanton, W. C. Keel, R. S. De Jong

Faculty Scholarship

We present Very Large Telescope/Visible Multiobject Spectrograph Integral Field Unit observations of an occulting galaxy pair previously discovered in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations. The foreground galaxy is a low-inclination spiral disc, which causes clear attenuation features seen against the bright bulge and disc of the background galaxy. We find redshifts of z = 0.064 ± 0.003 and 0.065 for the foreground and background galaxy, respectively. This relatively small difference does not rule out gravitational interaction between the two galaxies. Emission line ratios point to a star-forming, not active galactic nuclei dominated foreground galaxy. We fit the Cardelli, Clayton and …