Martin Bureau

Abstract:

We summarize results from McDermid et al. (2006), who present a set of follow-up observations of the sauron representative survey of early-type galaxies. We used the oasis integral-field spectrograph (while at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope) to obtain high spatial resolution spectra of 28 elliptical and lenticular galaxies. These seeing-limited data have on average twice the spatial resolution of the sauron data, albeit over a smaller field. These new data reveal previously unresolved features in these objects' stellar kinematics, stellar populations, and ionized gas properties. In this contribution, we focus on the discovery of a population of compact kinematically decoupled cores in a number of our sample galaxies. These compact cores are related to regions of young stars, and counter-rotate around the host galaxy's minor axis. We compare these objects to previously known decoupled components, which in contrast are composed of old stars, and which rotate around axes unrelated to the host galaxy's kinematics or shape. A key difference between these two kinds of decoupled cores are their physical size and relative mass. The compact decoupled cores are smaller than a few hundred parsec, and constitute less than a few percent of the total galaxy mass. The classical decoupled cores exist on kiloparsec scales, and comprise around a factor 10 more mass. We suggest that the small components are only found with young ages because of their low mass-to-light ratio. We show that after a few Gyrs, these components fade into the background galaxy, making them more difficult to detect. We draw the following conclusions: 1) young stars found in early-type galaxies are very often associated with centrally-concentrated counter-rotating components; 2) the small mass fraction and kinematic decoupling of these cores suggests that the star formation is associated to minor accretion events, which effectively drive the spread in luminosity-weighted ages found in early-type galaxies; and 3) such decoupled components may be common in all early-type galaxies, but not directly observed due to their small contribution to the total galaxy light at older ages. © 2007 International Astronomical Union.

Abstract:

The SAURON integral-field survey reveals that small (∼0.1,Re) kinematically decoupled cores (KDCs) in early-type galaxies are increasingly young toward the center and are typically found in fast-rotating galaxies, while large KDCs (∼0.5 Re) have homogeneously old stars and are present in non-rotating galaxies (McDermid et al. 2006). GALEX UV imaging further allows the direct identification of regions of recent star formation (0.5 Gyr). In NGC 2974 for example, young stars are identified in the center and an outer ring Jeong et al. 2006). Nuclear and inner ionised-gas rings (Sarzi et al. 2006) then suggest that current star formation is bar-driven. The CO detection rate of SAURON early-type galaxies is 40% (Combes et al. in prep.). Synthesis imaging reveals that it is generally contained in a well-ordered central disk, both in galaxies with a (young) central stellar disk (e.g. NGC 4459, NGC 4526) or a (young) KDC (e.g. NGC 3032, NGC 4150) (Young et al. in prep.). CO also traces well the young stellar populations and ionised gas distribution and kinematics, but in KDCs not always the stellar kinematics Emsellem et al. 2004; Sarzi et al. 2006; Kuntschner et al. 2006). © 2007 International Astronomical Union.

Abstract:

In this poster contribution, we present results from high spatial resolution integral-field spectroscopy of elliptical (E) and lenticular (S0) galaxies from the SAURON representative survey, obtained with the OASIS and GMOS spectrographs. These seeing-limited observations explore the central 10'10 (typically one kiloparsec diameter) regions of these galaxies using a spatial sampling four times higher than SAURON (027 vs. 094 spatial elements), resulting in almost a factor of two improvement in the median PSF. These data allow accurate study of the central regions to complement the large-scale view provided by SAURON. We derive the stellar and gas kinematics, stellar absorption-line strengths and nebular emission-line strengths for our sample, and derive maps of the luminosity-weighted stellar age, metallicity and abundance ratio via stellar population models. From these data we find a wealth of structures either not seen or poorly resolved in the SAURON data, including a number of kinematically-decoupled cores (KDCs) in the centres of some galaxies. We compare the intrinsic size and luminosity-weighted stellar age of all the visible KDCs in the full SAURON sample, and find two types of components: kiloparsec-scale KDCs, which are older than 8 Gyr, and are found in galaxies with little net rotation; and compact KDCs, which have intrinsic diameters of less than a few hundred parsec, show a range of stellar ages from 0.5 - 15 Gyr (with 5/6 younger than 5 Gyr), are found exclusively in fast-rotating galaxies, and are close to counter-rotating around the same axis as their host. Of the 7 galaxies in the SAURON sample with integrated luminosity-weighted ages less than 5 Gyr, 5 show such compact KDCs, suggesting a link between counter-rotation and recent star-formation. We show that this may be partly due to a combination of small sample size at young ages, and an observational bias, since young KDCs are easier to detect than their older and/or co-rot ating counterparts.