Galaxy formation and evolution

Abstract:

© 2016 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. We report a tight linear relation between the H i circular velocity measured at 6 R e and the stellar velocity dispersion measured within 1 R e for a sample of 16 early-type galaxies with stellar mass between 1010 and 1011 M ⊙ . The key difference from previous studies is that we only use spatially resolved v circ (H i) measurements obtained at large radius for a sizeable sample of objects. We can therefore link a kinematical tracer of the gravitational potential in the dark-matter dominated outer regions of galaxies with one in the inner regions, where baryons control the distribution of mass. We find that v circ (H i)= 1.33 σ e with an observed scatter of just 12 per cent. This indicates a strong coupling between luminous and dark matter from the inner- to the outer regions of early-type galaxies, analogous to the situation in spirals and dwarf irregulars. The v circ (H i)-σ e relation is shallower than those based on v circ measurements obtained from stellar kinematics and modelling at smaller radius, implying that v circ declines with radius - as in bulge-dominated spirals. Indeed, the value of v circ (H i) is typically 25 per cent lower than the maximum v circ derived at ~0.2 R e from dynamical models. Under the assumption of power-law total density profiles ρ ∝ r -γ , our data imply an average logarithmic slope 〈γ〉 = 2.18 ± 0.03 across the sample, with a scatter of 0.11 around this value. The average slope and scatter agree with recent results obtained from stellar kinematics alone for a different sample of early-type galaxies.

Abstract:

We present first results from the KMOS Redshift One Spectroscopic Survey (KROSS), an ongoing large kinematical survey of a thousand, z~1 star forming galaxies, with VLT KMOS. Out of the targeted galaxies (~500 so far), we detect and spatially resolve Ha emission in ~90% and 77% of the sample respectively. Based on the integrated Ha flux measurements and the spatially resolved maps we derive a median star formation rate (SFR) of ~7.0 Msun/yr and a median physical size of = 5.1kpc. We combine the inferred SFRs and effective radii measurements to derive the star formation surface densities ({\Sigma}SFR) and present a "resolved" version of the star formation main sequence (MS) that appears to hold at sub-galactic scales, with similar slope and scatter as the one inferred from galaxy integrated properties. Our data also yield a trend between {\Sigma}SFR and {\Delta}(sSFR) (distance from the MS) suggesting that galaxies with higher sSFR are characterised by denser star formation activity. Similarly, we find evidence for an anti-correlation between the gas phase metallicity (Z) and the {\Delta}(sSFR), suggesting a 0.2dex variation in the metal content of galaxies within the MS and significantly lower metallicities for galaxies above it. The origin of the observed trends between {\Sigma}SFR - {\Sigma}(sSFR) and Z - {\Delta}(sSFR) could be driven by an interplay between variations of the gas fraction or the star formation efficiency of the galaxies along and off the MS. To address this, follow-up observations of the our sample that will allow gas mass estimates are necessary.