2017MNRAS.472.3761N

We present high sensitivity H I observations of NGC 6822, obtained with the Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7). We study the kinematics, the mass distribution and the star formation thresholds. The KAT-7 short baselines and low system temperature make it sensitive to large-scale, low surface brightness emission. The observations detected ∼ 23 per cent more flux than previous Australian Telescope Compact Array observations. We fit a tilted ring model to the H I velocity field to derive the rotation curve (RC). The KAT-7 observations allow the measurement of the rotation curve of NGC 6822 out to 5.8 kpc, ∼1 kpc further than existing measurements. NGC 6822 is seen to be dark matter dominated at all radii. The observationally motivated pseudo-isothermal dark matter (DM) halo model reproduces well the observed RC while the Navarro Frank-White DM model gives a poor fit to the data. We find the best-fitting mass-to-light ratio (M/L) of 0.12 ± 0.01 which is consistent with the literature. The modified Newtonian dynamics gives a poor fit to our data. We derive the star formation threshold in NGC 6822 using the H I and H α data. The critical gas densities were calculated for gravitational instabilities using the Toomre-Q criterion and the cloud-growth criterion. We found that in regions of star formation, the cloud-growth criterion explains star formation better than the Toomre-Q criterion. This shows that the local shear rate could be a key player in cloud formation for irregular galaxies such as NGC 6822.