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H I Depletion Begins Well Beyond the Virial Radius: A FAST Stacking Study of 36 Galaxy Clusters to 5 × R200

  • Authors: Cheng Cheng, Chuan-Peng Zhang, Edo Ibar, Rory Smith, Weiwei Xu, Hyowon Kim, Jia-Sheng Huang, Wei Zhang, Pei Zuo, Hugo Méndez-Hernández, Juan Molina, Ming Zhu, Qian Yu

Cheng Cheng et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal 1009 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 6.

Left panel: averaged H I mass MHI/M* at different radii (color dots). Results from ALFALFA stacking (open triangles; H. Guo et al. 2021), the xGASS project (open circles; B. Catinella et al. 2018), and the HI-selected sample from the MIGHTEE-HI project (H. Pan et al. 2023) are shown for comparison. Our mass-selected sample (open colored circles) shows the lowest MHI/M* values among the samples. Previous studies typically include statistical uncertainties that scale with the number of stacked sources (﹩\sim 1/\sqrt{N}﹩), which are generally smaller than the uncertainties adopted in this work. Our error estimates additionally incorporate the intrinsic scatter of the stacking procedure. In particular, for each bin we randomly select 50% of the sample and perform the stacking 100 times, and the dispersion of the resulting stacked measurements is adopted as the uncertainty. As a result, our error bars are generally larger and more conservative. Right panel: comparison of our stacked MHI/M* measurements (colored dots) with individual galaxy H I measurements in three cluster environments: Coma (J. Healy et al. 2021), Antlia (K. M. Hess et al. 2015), and A2626 (T. Deb et al. 2025). The field galaxy stacking relation from ALFALFA (H. Guo et al. 2021) is shown for reference. Our stacking results are broadly consistent with H I measurements in other cluster environments, while providing significantly improved precision. The large scatter in individual cluster galaxy measurements reflects the intrinsic diversity of H I content among cluster members at fixed stellar mass.

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