ALBERT

Description: Context. Stellar population studies in the infrared (IR) wavelength range have two main advantages with respect to the optical regime: they probe different populations, because most of the light in the IR comes from redder and generally older stars, and they allow us to see through dust because IR light is less affected by extinction. Unfortunately, IR modeling work was halted by the lack of adequate stellar libraries, but this has changed in the recent years. Aims. Our project investigates the sensitivity of various spectral features in the 1−5 μm wavelength range to the physical properties of stars (Teff, [Fe/H], log g) and aims to objectively define spectral indices that can characterize the age and metallicity of unresolved stellar populations. Methods. We implemented a method that uses derivatives of the indices as functions of Teff, [Fe/H] or log g across the entire available wavelength range to reveal the most sensitive indices to these parameters and the ranges in which these indices work. Results. Here, we complement the previous work in the I and K bands, reporting a new system of 14, 12, 22, and 12 indices for Y, J, H, and L atmospheric windows, respectively, and describe their behavior. We list the equivalent widths of these indices for the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) spectral library stars. Conclusions. Our analysis indicates that features sensitive to the effective temperature are present and measurable in all the investigated atmospheric windows at the spectral resolution and in the metallicity range of the IRTF library for a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 20−30. The surface gravity is more challenging and only indices in the H and J windows are best suited for this. The metallicity range of the stars with available spectra is too narrow to search for suitable diagnostics. For the spectra of unresolved galaxies, the defined indices are valuable tools in tracing the properties of the stars in the IR-dominant stellar populations.

Description: Globular clusters (GCs) can be considered discrete, long-lived, dynamical tracers that retain crucial information about the assembly history of their parent galaxy. In this paper, we present a new catalogue of GC velocities and colours for the lenticular galaxy NGC 1023, we study their kinematics and spatial distribution, in comparison with the underlying stellar kinematics and surface brightness profile, and we test a new method for studying GC properties. Specifically, we decompose the galaxy light into its spheroid (assumed to represent the bulge+halo components) and disc components and use it to assign to each GC a probability of belonging to one of the two components. Then we model the galaxy kinematics, assuming a disc and spheroidal component, using planetary nebulae and integrated stellar light. We use this kinematic model and the probability previously obtained from the photometry to recalculate for each GC its likelihood of being associated with the disc, the spheroid, or neither. We find that the reddest GCs are likely to be associated with the disc, as found for faint fuzzies in this same galaxy, suggesting that the disc of this S0 galaxy originated at z ~= 2. The majority of blue GCs are found likely to be associated with the spheroidal (hot) component. The method also allows us to identify objects that are unlikely to be in equilibrium with the system. In NGC 1023 some of the rejected GCs form a substructure in phase space that is connected with NGC 1023 companion galaxy.

Description: We present an integral-field study of the internal structure, kinematics and stellar population of the almost edge-on, intermediate-luminosity ( L * ) elliptical galaxy NGC 4697. We build extended two-dimensional (2D) maps of the stellar kinematics and line strengths of the galaxy up to ~0.7 effective radii ( R eff ) using a mosaic of eight VIMOS (VIsible Multi-Objects Spectrograph, on the Very Large Telescope) integral-field unit pointings. We find clear evidence for a rotation-supported structure along the major axis from the 2D kinematical maps, confirming the previous classification of this system as a ‘fast rotator’. We study the correlations between the third and fourth Gauss–Hermite moments of the line-of-sight velocity distribution (LOSVD) h 3 and h 4 with the rotation parameter ( V /), and compare our findings to hydrodynamical simulations. We find remarkable similarities to predictions from gas-rich mergers. Based on photometry, we perform a bulge/disc decomposition and study the stellar population properties of the two components. The bulge and the disc show different stellar populations, with the stars in the bulge being older (age $_{\rm bulge}=13.5^{+1.4}_{-1.4}$ Gyr, age $_{\rm disc}=10.5^{+1.6}_{-2.0}$ Gyr) and more metal poor ( ${[M/{\rm H}]_{{\rm bulge}}} = -0.17^{+0.12}_{-0.1}$ , ${[M/{\rm H}]_{{\rm disc}}} = -0.03^{+0.02}_{-0.1}$ ). The evidence of a later-formed, more metal-rich disc embedded in an older, more metal poor bulge, together with the LOSVD structure, supports a mass assembly scenario dominated by gas-rich minor mergers and possibly with a late gas-rich major merger that left a previously rapidly rotating system unchanged. The bulge and the disc do not show signs of different stellar initial mass function (IMF) slopes, and both match well with a Milky Way-like IMF.

Description: We investigated the properties of the stellar populations in the discs of a sample of 10 spiral galaxies. Our analysis focused on the galaxy region where the disc contributes more than 95 per cent of total surface brightness in order to minimize the contamination of the bulge and bar. The luminosity-weighted age and metallicity were obtained by fitting the galaxy spectra with a linear combination of stellar population synthesis models, while the total overabundance of α-elements over iron was derived by measuring the line-strength indices. Most of the sample discs display a bimodal age distribution and they are characterized by a total [α/Fe] enhancement ranging from solar and supersolar. We interpreted the age bimodality as due to the simultaneous presence of both a young (Age ≤ 4 Gyr) and an old (Age 〉 4 Gyr) stellar population. The old stellar component usually dominates the disc surface brightness and its light contribution is almost constant within the observed radial range. For this reason, no age gradient is observed in half of the sample galaxies. The old component is slightly more metal poor than the young one. The metallicity gradient is negative and slightly positive in the old and young components, respectively. These results are in agreement with an inside-out scenario of disc formation and suggest a reduced impact of the radial migration on the stellar populations of the disc. The young component could be the result of a second burst of star formation in gas captured from the environment.

Description: Approximately 20 per cent of early-type galaxies host small nuclear stellar discs that are tens to a few hundred parsecs in size. Such discs are expected to be easily disrupted during major galactic encounters, hence their age serve to constrain their assembly history. We use VIsible MultiObject Spectrograph integral-field spectroscopic observations for the intermediate-mass E0 galaxy NGC 4458 and age-date its nuclear disc via high-resolution fitting of various model spectra. We find that the nuclear disc is at least 6 Gyr old. A clue to gain narrow limits to the stellar age is our knowledge of the nuclear disc contribution to the central surface brightness. The presence of an old nuclear disc, or the absence of disruptive encounters since z  ~ 0.6, for a small galaxy such as NGC 4458 which belongs to the Virgo cluster, may be consistent with a hierarchical picture for galaxy formation where the smallest galaxies assembles earlier and the crowded galactic environments reduce the incidence of galaxy mergers. On the other hand, NGC 4458 displays little or no bulk rotation except for a central kpc-scale kinematically decoupled core. Slow rotation and decoupled core are usually explained in terms of mergers. The presence and age of the nuclear disc constraint these mergers to have happened at high redshift.

Description: MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory) is a 6-yr SDSS-IV (Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV) survey that will obtain resolved spectroscopy from 3600 to 10 300 Å for a representative sample of over 10 000 nearby galaxies. In this paper, we derive spatially resolved stellar population properties and radial gradients by performing full spectral fitting of observed galaxy spectra from P-MaNGA, a prototype of the MaNGA instrument. These data include spectra for 18 galaxies, covering a large range of morphological type. We derive age, metallicity, dust, and stellar mass maps, and their radial gradients, using high spectral-resolution stellar population models, and assess the impact of varying the stellar library input to the models. We introduce a method to determine dust extinction which is able to give smooth stellar mass maps even in cases of high and spatially non-uniform dust attenuation. With the spectral fitting, we produce detailed maps of stellar population properties which allow us to identify galactic features among this diverse sample such as spiral structure, smooth radial profiles with little azimuthal structure in spheroidal galaxies, and spatially distinct galaxy sub-components. In agreement with the literature, we find the gradients for galaxies identified as early type to be on average flat in age, and negative (–0.15 dex/ R e ) in metallicity, whereas the gradients for late-type galaxies are on average negative in age (–0.39 dex/ R e ) and flat in metallicity. We demonstrate how different levels of data quality change the precision with which radial gradients can be measured. We show how this analysis, extended to the large numbers of MaNGA galaxies, will have the potential to shed light on galaxy structure and evolution.

Description: MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory) is a 6-yr Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) survey that will obtain spatially resolved spectroscopy from 3600 to 10 300 Å for a representative sample of over 10 000 nearby galaxies. In this paper, we present the analysis of nebular emission-line properties using observations of 14 galaxies obtained with P-MaNGA, a prototype of the MaNGA instrument. By using spatially resolved diagnostic diagrams, we find extended star formation in galaxies that are centrally dominated by Seyfert/LINER-like emission, which illustrates that galaxy characterizations based on single fibre spectra are necessarily incomplete. We observe extended low ionization nuclear emission-line regions (LINER)-like emission (up to 1 R e ) in the central regions of three galaxies. We make use of the Hα equivalent width [EW(Hα)] to argue that the observed emission is consistent with ionization from hot evolved stars. We derive stellar population indices and demonstrate a clear correlation between D n (4000) and EW(H A ) and the position in the ionization diagnostic diagram: resolved galactic regions which are ionized by a Seyfert/LINER-like radiation field are also devoid of recent star formation and host older and/or more metal-rich stellar populations. We also detect extraplanar LINER-like emission in two highly inclined galaxies, and identify it with diffuse ionized gas. We investigate spatially resolved metallicities and find a positive correlation between metallicity and star formation rate surface density. We further study the relation between N/O versus O/H on resolved scales. We find that, at given N/O, regions within individual galaxies are spread towards lower metallicities, deviating from the sequence defined by galactic central regions as traced by Sloan 3-arcsec fibre spectra. We suggest that the observed dispersion can be a tracer for gas flows in galaxies: infalls of pristine gas and/or the effect of a galactic fountain.

Description: The stellar kinematics of the spheroids and discs of S0 galaxies contain clues to their formation histories. Unfortunately, it is difficult to disentangle the two components and to recover their stellar kinematics in the faint outer parts of the galaxies using conventional absorption line spectroscopy. This paper therefore presents the stellar kinematics of six S0 galaxies derived from observations of planetary nebulae, obtained using the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph. To separate the kinematics of the two components, we use a maximum-likelihood method that combines the discrete kinematic data with a photometric component decomposition. The results of this analysis reveal that: the discs of S0 galaxies are rotationally supported; however, the amount of random motion in these discs is systematically higher than in comparable spiral galaxies; and the S0s lie around one magnitude below the Tully–Fisher relation for spiral galaxies, while their spheroids lie nearly one magnitude above the Faber–Jackson relation for ellipticals. All of these findings are consistent with a scenario in which spirals are converted into S0s through a process of mild harassment or ‘pestering,’ with their discs somewhat heated and their spheroid somewhat enhanced by the conversion process. In such a scenario, one might expect the properties of S0s to depend on environment. We do not see such an effect in this fairly small sample, although any differences would be diluted by the fact that the current location does not necessarily reflect the environment in which the transformation occurred. Similar observations of larger samples probing a broader range of environments, coupled with more detailed modelling of the transformation process to match the wide range of parameters that we have shown can now be measured, should take us from these first steps to the definitive answer as to how S0 galaxies form.

Description: We present the results of VLT-MUSE (Very Large Telescope-Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) integral field spectroscopy of SECCO 1, a faint, star-forming stellar system recently discovered as the stellar counterpart of an ultracompact high-velocity cloud (HVC 274.68+74.0), very likely residing within a substructure of the Virgo cluster of galaxies. We have obtained the radial velocity of a total of 38 individual compact sources identified as H ii regions in the main and secondary bodies of the system, and derived the metallicity for 18 of them. We provide the first direct demonstration that the two stellar bodies of SECCO 1 are physically associated and that their velocities match the H i velocities. The metallicity is quite uniform over the whole system, with a dispersion lower than the uncertainty on individual metallicity estimates. The mean abundance, 〈12 + log(O/H)〉 = 8.44, is much higher than the typical values for local dwarf galaxies of similar stellar mass. This strongly suggests that the SECCO 1 stars were born from a pre-enriched gas cloud, possibly stripped from a larger galaxy. Using archival Hubble Space Telescope ( HST ) images, we derive a total stellar mass of ~=1.6 x 10 5 M for SECCO 1, confirming that it has a very high H i -to-stellar mass ratio for a dwarf galaxy, $M_{\rm H\,\small {I}}$ / M * ~ 100. The star formation rate, derived from the Hα flux, is a factor of more than 10 higher than in typical dwarf galaxies of similar luminosity.

Description: Previous studies have reported the existence of two counter-rotating stellar discs in the early-type spiral galaxy NGC 7217. We have obtained high-resolution optical spectroscopic data ( R 9000) with the new fibre-based Integral Field Unit instrument VIRUS-W at the 2.7-m telescope of the McDonald Observatory in Texas. Our analysis confirms the existence of two components. However, we find them to be corotating. The first component is the more luminous (77 per cent of the total light), has the higher velocity dispersion (170 km s –1 ) and rotates relatively slowly (projected v max = 50 km s –1 ). The lower luminosity second component (23 per cent of the total light) has a low velocity dispersion (20 km s –1 ) and rotates quickly (projected v max = 150 km s –1 ). The difference in the kinematics of the two stellar components allows us to perform a kinematic decomposition and to measure the strengths of their Mg and Fe Lick indices separately. The rotational velocities and dispersions of the less luminous and faster component are very similar to those of the interstellar gas as measured from the [O iii ] emission. Morphological evidence of active star formation in this component further suggests that NGC 7217 may be in the process of (re)growing a disc inside a more massive and higher dispersion stellar halo. The kinematically cold and regular structure of the gas disc in combination with the central almost dust-free morphology allows us to compare the dynamical mass inside of the central 500 pc with predictions from a stellar population analysis. We find agreement between the two if a Kroupa stellar initial mass function is assumed.