The Tully–Fisher relation and the Bosma effect

Abstract

We show that the rotation curves of 16 nearby disc galaxies in the THINGS sample and the Milky Way can be described by the Navarro–Frenk–White halo model and by the Bosma effect at approximately the same level of accuracy. The latter effect suggests that the behaviour of the rotation curve at large radii is determined by the rescaled gas component and thus that dark matter and gas distributions are tightly correlated. By focusing on galaxies with exponential decay in their gas surface density, we can normalize their rotation curves to match the exponential thin disc model at large enough radii. This normalization assumes that the galaxy mass is estimated consistently within this model, assuming a thin disc structure. We show that this rescaling allows us to derive a new version of the Tully–Fisher (TF) relation, the Bosma TF relation that nicely fit the data. In the framework of this model, the connection between the Bosma TF relation and the baryonic TF relation can be established by considering an additional empirical relation between the baryonic mass and the total mass of the disc, as measured in the data.