The ATLAS3D project – I. A volume-limited sample of 260 nearby early-type galaxies: science goals and selection criteria

By M. Cappellari, Eric Emsellem, D. Krajnovi'c, R. McDermid, Nicholas Scott, G. Kleijn, L. M. Young, K. Alatalo, R. Bacon, L. Blitz and 16 more. 2010

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The ATLAS3D project is a multiwavelength survey combined with a theoretical modelling effort. The observations span from the radio to the millimetre and optical, and provide multicolour imaging, two-dimensional kinematics of the atomic (H i), molecular (CO) and ionized gas (H beta, [O iii] and [N i]), together with the kinematics and population of the stars (H beta, Fe5015 and Mg b), for a carefully selected, volume-limited (1.16 x 105 Mpc3) sample of 260 early-type (elliptical E and lenticular S0) galaxies (ETGs). The models include semi-analytic, N-body binary mergers and cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. Here we present the science goals for the project and introduce the galaxy sample and the selection criteria. The sample consists of nearby (D 15 degrees) morphologically selected ETGs extracted from a parent sample of 871 galaxies (8 per cent E, 22 per cent S0 and 70 per cent spirals) brighter than M-K <-21.5 mag (stellar mass M-star greater than or similar to 6 x109 M-circle dot). We analyse possible selection biases and we conclude that the parent sample is essentially complete and statistically representative of the nearby galaxy population. We present the size-luminosity relation for the spirals and ETGs and show that the ETGs in the ATLAS3D sample define a tight red sequence in a colour-magnitude diagram, with few objects in the transition from the blue cloud. We describe the strategy of the SAURON integral field observations and the extraction of the stellar kinematics with the ppxf method. We find typical 1 Sigma errors of delta V approximate to 6 km s-1, delta Sigma approximate to 7 km s-1, delta h(3) approximate to delta h(4) approximate to 0.03 in the mean velocity, the velocity dispersion and Gauss-Hermite (GH) moments for galaxies with effective dispersion Sigma(e) greater than or similar to 120 km s-1. For galaxies with lower Sigma(e) (approximate to 40 per cent of the sample) the GH moments are gradually penalized by ppxf towards zero to suppress the noise produced by the spectral undersampling and only V and Sigma can be measured. We give an overview of the characteristics of the other main data sets already available for our sample and of the ongoing modelling projects.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ecedaf0770737ae5f40d1cb2f30a51868bc1570

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Citations in the corpus

The ATLAS3D project - II. Morphologies, kinemetric features and alignment between photometric and kinematic axes of early-type galaxies (2011, background): “…three-fold: (i) to analyse the kinematic maps and images of the volume-limited sample of nearby early-type galaxies gathered by the ATLAS3D project (Cappellari et al. 2011a, hereinafter Paper I); (ii) to characterize quantitatively the morphological and kinematic features and determine their…”
The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Instrument specification and target selection (2014, background): “The first survey to amass a significant sample of galaxies was the SAURON survey (de Zeeuw et al. 2002) of 72 nearby galaxies, which was then extended into the ATLAS3D survey (Cappellari et al. 2011) and resulted in 260 galaxies at z < 0.01.”
The SLUGGS Survey: kinematics for over 2500 globular clusters in 12 early-type galaxies (2012, methodology): “Along these lines, the ATLAS3D project (Cappellari et al. 2011) has carried out a rich survey of galaxies employing an integral field unit (IFU) technique to map E-mail: vpota@astro.swin.edu.au out the chemodynamics of galaxies within 1 effective radius (Reff).”
The AIMSS Project I: bridging the star cluster, galaxy divide (2014, methodology): “…connection between UCDs/cEs and earlytype galaxies (both ellipticals and S0s) we make use of the galaxy sample from Misgeld & Hilker (2011) and Brodie et al. (2011) combined with the ATLAS3D (Cappellari et al. 2011) survey to provide a representative comparison sample of normal early-type galaxies.”
The SDSS-IV MaNGA Sample: Design, Optimization, and Usage Considerations (2017, methodology): “This optimization dovetails MaNGA’s scientific goals for statistical analyses of resolved galaxy samples, and complements existing, smaller data sets such as ATLAS3D (Cappellari et al. 2011), DiskMass (Bershady et al. 2010), and CALIFA (Sánchez et al. 2012), as well as forthcoming data from instrum”
The ATLAS3D project - XIII. Mass and morphology of H I in early-type galaxies as a function of environment (2011, background): “These results are placed on a firm statistical ground by ATLAS3D, a multi-wavelength study of a volume-limited sample of 260 morphologically selected ETGs (Cappellari et al. 2011a, hereafter Paper I).”
The ATLAS3D project – III. A census of the stellar angular momentum within the effective radius of early‐type galaxies: unveiling the distribution of fast and slow rotators (2011, methodology): “…accurate dynamical masses, Mdyn, were derived via MultiGaussian Expansion (Emsellem, Monnet & Bacon 1994) of the galaxies’ photometry followed by detailed Jeans anisotropic dynamical models (Cappellari 2008; Scott et al. 2009) of the ATLAS3D SAURON stellar kinematics (Cappellari et al. 2010).”
Radial variations in the stellar initial mass function of early-type galaxies (2014, background): “′′84 for NGC4387, NGC4552 and NGC5557, respectively (Cappellari et al. 2011).”
Improving the full spectrum fitting method: accurate convolution with Gauss-Hermite functions (2016, methodology): “…2011; Thomas et al. 2013), while the remaining choices are useful when extracting the stellar or gas kinematics with ppxf, due to the extra freedom which allows one e.g. to fit possible variations in elemental abundances (e.g. Cappellari et al. 2011; Blanc et al. 2013; van de Sande et al. 2016).”
Dark halo response and the stellar initial mass function in early-type and late-type galaxies (2010, background): “The ATLAS3D project (Cappellari et al. 2011) contains ∼ 10 times more galaxies than studied by Cappellari et al. (2006), and thus promises to provide stronger constraints on Vcirc(Re)/σe over a wider range of galaxy masses than previous dynamical studies.”
The ATLAS3D project – IV. The molecular gas content of early-type galaxies (2011, methodology): “The dynamical mass used here is, however, derived from stellar dynamical models of the SAURON stellar kinematics (Cappellari et al. 2010), using the Jeans anisotropic modelling technique of Cappellari (2008).”
The ATLAS3D project – XX. Mass–size and mass–σ distributions of early-type galaxies: bulge fraction drives kinematics, mass-to-light ratio, molecular gas fraction and stellar initial mass function (2012, background): “The volume-limited ATLAS3D sample of nearby early-type galaxies (ETGs; Cappellari et al. 2011a, hereafter Paper I) constitute an ideal benchmark for studying scaling relations and the distribution of galaxy properties, given the availability of a highquality multiwavelength data set.”
The ATLAS3D project - XXIX. The new look of early-type galaxies and surrounding fields disclosed by extremely deep optical images (2014, methodology): “For a consistent comparison, they were not multiplied by the factor of 1.35 used to reconcile the MGE value with the original one in Cappellari et al. (2011). c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 and kinematical properties probed by the ATLAS3D survey. g and r band images are available for all galaxies…”
Raining on black holes and massive galaxies: the top-down multiphase condensation model (2016, background): “The ATLAS3D survey finds that ETGs with low angular momentum have low CO detection rates (Young et al. 2011).”
Simulations of binary galaxy mergers and the link with fast rotators, slow rotators, and kinematically distinct cores (2011, background): “The ATLAS3D project1 (Cappellari et al. 2011, hereafter Paper I) aims to quantify the distribution and kinematics of the stellar and gaseous components of a statistically significant sample of ETGs to relate their detailed properties to their mass assembly, star formation history and evolution.”
The ATLAS3D project - X. On the origin of the molecular and ionized gas in early-type galaxies (2011, background): “…our local the luminosity surface density estimator, based on a redshift cylinder with a depth of 600 km s−1, and an angular size adapted to include the 3rd nearest neighbor, as presented in Cappellari et al. (2011b) (Paper VII; Table 2, Column 7 and available online athttp://www.purl.org/atlas3d).”
KILOPARSEC-SCALE DUST DISKS IN HIGH-REDSHIFT LUMINOUS SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES (2016, result): “In Figure 9, we compare the properties of the ALESS SMGs studied in this work with the volume–limited ATLAS3D sample of nearby early–type galaxies (Cappellari et al. 2011).”