We present 3D hydrodynamical simulations of ram pressure stripping of massive
disc galaxies in clusters. Studies of galaxies that move face-on have predicted
that in such a geometry the galaxy can lose a substantial amount of its
interstellar medium. But only a small fraction of galaxies is moving face-on.
Therefore, in this work we focus on a systematic study of the effect of the
inclination angle between the direction of motion and the galaxy's rotation
axis.
In agreement with some previous works, we find that the inclination angle
does not play a major role for the mass loss as long as the galaxy is not
moving close to edge-on. We can predict this behaviour by extending Gunn &
Gott's estimate of the stripping radius, which is valid for face-on geometries,
to moderate inclinations.
The inclination plays a role as long as the ram pressure is comparable to
pressures in the galactic plane, which can span two orders of magnitude. For
very strong ram pressures, the disc will be stripped completely, and for very
weak ram pressures, mass loss is negligible independent of inclination. We show
that in non-edge-on geometries the stripping proceeds remarkably similar. A
major difference between different inclinations is the degree of asymmetry
introduced in the remaining gas disc.
We demonstrate that the tail of gas stripped from the galaxy does not
necessarily point in a direction opposite to the galaxy's direction of motion.
Therefore, the observation of a galaxy's gas tail may be misleading about the
galaxy's direction of motion.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, submitted to MNRAS. pdf version with high
resolution figures available at
http://www.faculty.iu-bremen.de/eroediger/PLOTLINKS/eroediger_rps.pd
