Stellar and dynamical masses of ellipticals in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By Nikhil Padmanabhan, Uros Seljak, M. Strauss, M. Blanton, G. Kauffmann, David Schlegel, Christy A. Tremonti, N. Bahcall, Mariangela Bernardi, J. Brinkmann and 2 more. 2003

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We study the variation of the dark matter mass fraction of elliptical galaxies as a function of their luminosity, stellar mass, and size using a sample of 29,469 elliptical galaxies culled from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We model ellipticals as a stellar Hernquist profile embedded in an adiabatically compressed dark matter halo. This model allows us to estimate a dynamical mass (Mdynm) at the half-light radius from the velocity dispersion of the spectra, and to compare these to the stellar mass estimates (M*) from Kauffmann et al. [MNRAS 341 (2003) 33]. We find that M*/L is independent of luminosity, while Mdynm/L increases with luminosity, implying that the dark matter fraction increases with luminosity. We also observe that at a fixed luminosity or stellar mass, the dark matter fraction increases with increasing galaxy size or, equivalently, increases with decreasing surface brightness: high surface brightness galaxies show almost no evidence for dark matter, while in low surface brightness galaxies, the dark matter exceeds the stellar mass at the half-light radius. We relate this to the fundamental plane of elliptical galaxies, suggesting that the tilt of this plane from simple virial predictions is due to the dark matter in galaxies. We find that a simple model where galaxies are embedded in dark matter halos and have a star formation efficiency independent of their surface brightness explains these trends. We estimate the virial mass of ellipticals as being approximately 7–30 times their stellar mass, with the lower limit suggesting almost all of the gas within the virial radius is converted into stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmological Simulations with Self-Interacting Dark Matter I: Constant Density Cores and Substructure (2012, background): “…have a significant amount of dark matter within their half-light radii, with more massive ellipticals having larger mass-to-light ratios, either caused by varying stellar mass-to-light ratios or varying dark matter content (Padmanabhan et al. 2004; Tollerud et al. 2011; Conroy & van Dokkum 2012).”
STECKMAP: STEllar Content and Kinematics from high resolution galactic spectra via Maximum A Posteriori (2005, background): “…could provide estimates of the stellar and dynamical masses (which must be corrected for fiber aperture though), thereby allowing astronomers the prospect of investigating the dark matter content in galaxies on a statistically significant sample, in the spirit of Padmanabhan et al. (2004).”
The Spatial Clustering of Star-forming Galaxies at Redshifts 1.4 ≲ z ≲ 3.5 (2004, background): “…almost 20% as many baryons as the more numerous and smaller halos with M 1011:5 M that contain LBGs; objects with stellar masses M > 2 ; 1011 M contain nearly 5% of all stars in the local universe (Kauffmann et al. 2003) and 20% of the stars in local elliptical galaxies (Padmanabhan et al. 2004).”
Ages and metallicities of early-type galaxies in the SDSS: new insight into the physical origin of the colour-magnitude and the Mg2-sigmaV relations (2006, background): “This arises presumably from the fact that the Petrosian flux represents typically 80 percent of the total flux in the de Vaucouleurs model (Padmanabhan et al. 2004), but this could also result (at least for a class of objects) from forcing a de Vaucouleurs fit to a flatter galaxy light profile. c©…”
Curvature in the scaling relations of early-type galaxies (2008, methodology): “This provides an important piece of information for adiabatic contraction based models of scaling laws (e.g. Padmanabhan et al. 2004; Lintott et al. 2005).”
Galaxy–galaxy weak lensing in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: intrinsic alignments and shear calibration errors (2004, background): “Padmanabhan et al. (2004) find that for Mr = −22 elliptical galaxies (the fainter edge of this brightest luminosity bin), the typical 50 per cent light radius is 10 h−1 kpc, in which case there may be significant overlap at the innermost bin (r = 20 h−1 kpc).”
THE SLOAN LENS ACS SURVEY. IX. COLORS, LENSING, AND STELLAR MASSES OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2009, background): “Joint dynamical and stellar population modeling has suggested that more massive early-type galaxies have higher dark matter fractions (e.g., Padmanabhan et al. 2004) that could explain most of the tilt (Tortora et al. 2009).”
Determining the Properties and Evolution of Red Galaxies from the Quasar Luminosity Function (2005, background): “…well the observedz= 0 effective radius-stellar mass relation of remnant red/elliptical galaxies (e.g. Bernardi et al. 2003a, Shen et al. 2003; Padmanabhan et al. 2004; Cappellari et al. 2005), as well as predicting that this relation should evolve at most weakly with redshift, in agreement…”
Feedback in simulations of disc-galaxy major mergers (2005, background): “…2003; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2005, 2006; Robertson et al. 2006), a tight correlation between the velocity dispersion, effective radius, and luminosity, on which all ellipticals reside (Djorgovski & Davis 1987; Dressler et al. 1987; Bender et al. 1992; Bernardi et al. 2003; Padmanabhan et al. 2004).”
The Evolution and Structure of Early-Type Field Galaxies: A Combined Statistical Analysis of Gravitational Lenses (2004, background): “These results are consistent with recent dynamical analyses of earlytype galaxies (Gerhard et al. 2001; Bernardi et al. 2003; Borriello et al. 2003; Padmanabhan et al. 2004).”
Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, background): “…for instance, the contribution of dark matter to the inner regions of galaxies where both baryons and dark matter interact and possibly play equal partners in galaxy formation models (e.g. Saglia et al. 1992; Bertin et al. 1992; Loewenstein & White 1999; Keeton 2001; Padmanabhan et al. 2004).”
The Spitzer/IRAC view of black hole–bulge scaling relations (2010, background): “We assume that Mdyn in bulges is dominated by the stellar mass, with a negligible contribution of dark matter and gas (Drory, Bender & Hopp 2004; Padmanabhan et al. 2004).”
The Fundamental Scaling Relations of Elliptical Galaxies (2005, background): “…FP tilt, especially those that conclude directly that these nonhomologies are either unimportant or of minor significance (Gerhard et al. 2001; Cappellari et al. 2006), significant (e.g., Padmanabhan et al. 2004), or of possible but as yet not fully determined importance (e.g., Pahre et al. 1998b).”
Density profiles of galaxy groups and clusters from SDSS galaxy–galaxy weak lensing (2006, methodology): “We note that we have central velocity dispersions for the LRG sample used in this analysis, which has been used to learn about AC and dark matter inside the optical radius (Padmanabhan et al. 2004).”
THE INITIAL MASS FUNCTION OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, unknown): “…probes of mass. Previous works have attempted to do this by comparing stellar masses determined from stellar populations synthesis models with those inferred from gravitational lensing (e.g., Ferreras et al. 2008) or stellar kinematics (e.g., Padmanabhan et al. 2004; Cappellari et al. 2006).”
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): “A large study of SDSS elliptical galaxies using fixed spherical Hernquist galaxy models with dark haloes (Padmanabhan et al. 2004) found a mass excess over the predictions of stellar population models with a fixed IMF, increasing with luminosity.”
The Luminosity and Color Dependence of the Galaxy Correlation Function (2004, background): “Dynamical mass estimates of galaxies from velocity dispersions of stars (e.g., Padmanabhan et al. 2004) or satellite galaxies (e.g., Prada et al. 2003; McKay et al. 2002) and aperture mass measured from weak lensing (e.g., McKay et al. 2001; Sheldon et al. 2004; Tasitsiomi et al. 2004) do not show…”
VERY HIGH GAS FRACTIONS AND EXTENDED GAS RESERVOIRS IN z = 1.5 DISK GALAXIES (2009, background): “Padmanabhan et al. (2004) find similar dark matter fractions in massive galaxies and emphasize the fact that higher fraction are found only in low-mass and low-density galaxies.”