Galaxy Morphologies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Dominance of Linear Structures at the Detection Limit

By D. Elmegreen, Bruce G. Elmegreen, D. Rubin, Meredith A. Schaffer. 2005

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Galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) larger than 10 pixels (0.″3) have been classified according to morphology, and their photometric properties are presented. There are 269 spiral, 100 elliptical, 114 chain, 126 double-clump, 97 tadpole, and 178 clump-cluster galaxies. We also cataloged 30 B-band and 13 V-band dropouts and calculated their star formation rates. Chains, doubles, and tadpoles dominate the other types at faint magnitudes. The fraction of obvious bars among spirals is ~10%, a factor of 2-3 lower than in other deep surveys. The distribution function of axial ratios for elliptical galaxies is similar to that seen locally, suggesting that ellipticals relaxed quickly to a standardized shape. The distribution of axial ratios for spiral galaxies is significantly different than locally, having a clear peak at ~0.55 instead of a nearly flat distribution. The falloff at small axial ratio occurs at a higher value than locally, indicating thicker disks by a factor of ~2. The falloff at high axial ratio could be from intrinsic triaxial shapes or selection effects. Inclined disks should be more highly sampled than face-on disks near the surface brightness limit of a survey. Simple models and data distributions demonstrate these effects. The decreased numbers of obvious spiral galaxies at high redshifts could be partly the result of surface brightness selection.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Observations of Thick Disks in the Hubble Space Telescope Ultra Deep Field (2006, background): “We found the same for spirals and chain galaxies in the Tadpole Galaxy background field (Elmegreen, et al. 2004b, hereafter EEH04) and the UDF (Elmegreen & Elmegreen 2005, hereafter EE05; Elmegreen et al. 2005a; hereafter EERS).”
Broadband Imaging of a Large Sample of Irregular Galaxies (2005, background): “…intrinsic ratios of width (W ) to length (L) BROADBAND IMAGING OF IRREGULAR GALAXIES 61No. 1, 2006 uniformly distributed in the range 0.7–1, and intrinsic ratios of thickness (Z ) to length uniformly distributed in the range 0.29– 0.67 (see discussion of triaxial models in Elmegreen et al. 2005).”
THE KILOPARSEC-SCALE KINEMATICS OF HIGH-REDSHIFT STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2009, background): “Morphologies As demonstrated by numerous authors (e.g. Abraham et al. 1996; Conselice et al. 2005; Elmegreen et al. 2005; Lotz et al. 2006; Law et al. 2007b) the morphological structure of galaxies at redshift z & 2 is highly irregular and frequently composed of multiple spatially separated…”
High-redshift clumpy discs and bulges in cosmological simulations (2009, background): “In these extreme conditions, the images of most SFGs are irregular with giant clumps (Cowie, Hu & E-mail: ceverino@phys.huji.ac.il (DC); dekel@phys.huji.ac.il (AD); frederic.bournaud@cea.fr (FB) Songaila 1995; van den Bergh et al. 1996; Elmegreen et al. 2005, 2007).”
The structures of distant galaxies – I. Galaxy structures and the merger rate to z∼ 3 in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (2007, background): “There are also more fainter galaxies than brighter ones, thus it is not surprising that peculiars are the dominant population (e.g., Elmegreen et al. 2005; Ravindranath et al. 2006).”
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (2003, unknown): “Elmegreen et al. (2005) reach a similar conclusion about galaxies in the HUDF by morphologically classifying all large galaxies in the field and comparing them with local distributions.”
UVUDF: ULTRAVIOLET THROUGH NEAR-INFRARED CATALOG AND PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFTS OF GALAXIES IN THE HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD (2015, background): “…formation rate density (e.g., Bouwens et al. 2007, 2009, 2010), to determine the morphological properties of galaxies (e.g., Bouwens et al. 2004; Elmegreen et al. 2005c; Straughn et al. 2006; Hathi et al. 2008a; Elmegreen & Elmegreen 2010; Oesch et al. 2010b; Elmegreen & Elmegreen 2014), to…”
Distant radio galaxies and their environments (2008, background): “These galaxies (linear ”flies”) have similar morphologies (e.g. chains and tadpoles) to the linear galaxies that dominate resolved faint galaxies (i775 > 24) in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF)(Elmegreen et al 2005; Straughn et al 2006).”
Bulge Formation by the Coalescence of Giant Clumps in Primordial Disk Galaxies (2008, methodology): “For 178 clump clusters in the UDF, 27% 14% of the i775 light is in clumps, compared to 8% for spirals (Elmegreen et al. 2005a).”
PHIBSS: MOLECULAR GAS CONTENT AND SCALING RELATIONS IN z ∼ 1–3 MASSIVE, MAIN-SEQUENCE STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2012, background): “Rest-frame UV- and B-band HST images of many z~1-1.5 SFGs and almost all z~2-3 SFGs are clumpy and asymmetric, even if rotational support dominates (Figures 2-5, Elmegreen et al. 2005, Wuyts et al. 2012).”
Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time (2014, background): “We find diverse morphologies, which represent all the main morphological types observed in the UDF, namely discs, spheroids, clump clusters, chain galaxies, tadpoles, mergers, and other irregular types (Elmegreen et al. 2005, 2007).”
Resolved Galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Star Formation in Disks at High Redshift (2007, methodology): “The spiral sizes were measured in a somewhat standard way, using their exponential disk scale lengths (from Elmegreen et al. 2005a).”
Star formation sustained by gas accretion (2014, background): “Ceverino et al. (2012) model the kind of clumpy disks observed at high redshift (Elmegreen et al. 2005, 2007b; Genzel et al. 2011).”
A CATALOG OF DETAILED VISUAL MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATIONS FOR 14,034 GALAXIES IN THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (2010, background): “Figure 6 shows galaxies which we have sub-classified as being (possible) low-redshift equivalents of high-z clump clusters (top panel), doubles (middle panel) or tadpole galaxies (bottom panel) as defined by Elmegreen et al. (2005).”
BULGE AND CLUMP EVOLUTION IN HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD CLUMP CLUSTERS, CHAINS AND SPIRAL GALAXIES (2008, methodology): “This supports a model where the disk forms by the dissolution of clumps (Elmegreen et al. 2005b), and some bulges form by the mergers of clumps (e.g., Noguchi 1999; see recent discussions in Bournaud et al. 2007, Elmegreen et al. 2008b).”
THE ORIGIN AND OPTICAL DEPTH OF IONIZING RADIATION IN THE “GREEN PEA” GALAXIES (2013, background): “Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging of a handful of the Peas reveals clumpy morphologies and super star clusters (Cardamone et al. 2009), a common mode of star formation at high redshift (e.g., Cowie et al. 1995; Dickinson et al. 2003; Elmegreen et al. 2005).”
EVOLVING GRAVITATIONALLY UNSTABLE DISKS OVER COSMIC TIME: IMPLICATIONS FOR THICK DISK FORMATION (2011, background): “A whole class of galaxies has been observed whose images are dominated by large luminous clumps of gas (Elmegreen et al. 2004, 2005; Förster Schreiber et al. 2009), while measurements of the velocity dispersion of such massive star-forming galaxies have found values near 50 km/s spread across the…”
Accretion-driven turbulence as universal process: galaxies, molecular clouds, and protostellar disks (2009, background): “High-redshift galaxies, such as detected in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, are observed to be very irregular, with a clumpy structure, and a lack of central concentration (Elmegreen et al. 2005; Conselice 2003; Elmegreen et al. 2009b).”
Rotational support of giant clumps in high-z disc galaxies (2011, methodology): “First dubbed “clump-cluster” and “chain” galaxies, based on their face-on or edge-on images (Cowie et al. 1995; van den Bergh 1996; Elmegreen et al. 2004, 2005, 2007), a significant fraction of these galaxies (> 50% for the more massive ones) are confirmed by spectroscopic measurements to be…”
The SINS/zC-SINF Survey of z ∼ 2 Galaxy Kinematics: SINFONI Adaptive Optics–assisted Data and Kiloparsec-scale Emission-line Properties (2018, methodology): “…motions relative to rotational motions in previous work and structural studies from deep high resolution rest-UV/optical imaging of z ∼ 2 disks (e.g., Elmegreen et al. 2005, 2017; Genzel et al. 2008; Cresci et al. 2009; Law et al. 2012b,a; Newman et al. 2013; van der Wel et al. 2014a; Wisnioski et…”