The SAURON project — II. Sample and early results

By P. de Zeeuw, M. Bureau, Eric Emsellem, R. Bacon, C. Carollo, Y. Copin, Roger Davies, H. Kuntschner, B. Miller, G. Monnet and 2 more. 2001

438 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Early results are reported from the SAURON survey of the kinematics and stellar populations of a representative sample of nearby E, S0 and Sa galaxies. The survey is aimed at determining the intrinsic shape of the galaxies, their orbital structure, the mass-to-light ratio as a function of radius, the age and metallicity of the stellar populations, and the frequency of kinematically decoupled cores and nuclear black holes. The construction of the representative sample is described, and its properties are illustrated. A comparison with long-slit spectroscopic data establishes that the SAURON measurements are comparable to, or better than, the highest-quality determinations. Comparisons are presented for NGC 3384 and 4365, where stellar velocities and velocity dispersions are determined to a precision of 6 km s - 1 , and the h 3 and h 4 parameters of the line-of-sight velocity distribution to a precision of better than 0.02. Extraction of accurate gas emission-line intensities, velocities and linewidths from the data cubes is illustrated for NGC 5813. Comparisons with published line strengths for NGC 3384 and 5813 reveal uncertainties of 0.1 A on the measurements of the Hβ, Mg b and Fe5270 indices. Integral-field mapping uniquely connects measurements of the kinematics and stellar populations to the galaxy morphology. The maps presented here illustrate the rich stellar kinematics, gaseous kinematics, and line-strength distributions of early-type galaxies. The results include the discovery of a thin, edge-on, disc in NGC 3623, confirm the axisymmetric shape of the central region of M32, illustrate the LINER nucleus and surrounding counter-rotating star-forming ring in NGC 7742, and suggest a uniform stellar population in the decoupled core galaxy NGC 5813.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. M. Cappellari
2. P. Hopkins
3. L. Hernquist
4. C. Conroy
5. Thomas J. Cox
6. T. Naab
7. Volker Springel
8. Luis C. Ho

In Instrumentation

1. M. Cappellari
2. P. Hopkins
3. L. Hernquist
4. C. Conroy
5. Thomas J. Cox
6. Luis C. Ho
7. T. Naab
8. J. Kormendy

Citations in the corpus

• The SAURON project – XVII. Stellar population analysis of the absorption line strength maps of 48 early-type galaxies (2010, methodology): “We have conducted a survey of 72 representative early-type (E, S0, and Sa) galaxies using the integral-field spectrographSAURON mounted on the William Herschel Telescope in La Palma (Bacon et al. 2001; de Zeeuw et al. 2002).”
• The black hole mass–stellar velocity dispersion correlation: bulges versus pseudo-bulges (2008, background): “NGC 3384 has a inner disk (Erwin 2004) and a bulge with disk-like kinetic property (de Zeeuw et al. 2002).”
• Molecular gas and star formation in the SAURON early-type galaxies (2007, positive): “Once rescaled to our own conversion factor and distance (see de Zeeuw et al. 2002 for the latter), Watson, Guptill & Buchholz (1994) quote an H2 mass of 5.2 × 108 M⊙ for NGC2685, while Schinnerer & Scoville (2002) report 2.7 × 107 M⊙.”
• The ATLAS3D project – I. A volume-limited sample of 260 nearby early-type galaxies: science goals and selection criteria (2010, methodology): “Due to the exploratory character of theSAURON survey (de Zeeuw et al. 2002), the ETGs were selected to sample, witha relatively small number of objects, a wide range of masses, shapes and morphologies.”
• Improving the full spectrum fitting method: accurate convolution with Gauss-Hermite functions (2016, background): “For more than a decade, this information has been extracted from IFS data by surveys targeting one galaxy at a time (SAURON de Zeeuw et al. 2002; DiskMass Bershady et al. 2010; ATLAS3D Cappellari et al. 2011; CALIFA Sánchez et al. 2012).”
• Adaptive spatial binning of integral-field spectroscopic data using Voronoi tessellations (2003, methodology): “1) taken with the panoramic IFS SAURON (Bacon et al. 2001; de Zeeuw et al. 2002) at the 4.2-m William Herschel telescope on La Palma.”
• Parametric Recovery of Line‐of‐Sight Velocity Distributions from Absorption‐Line Spectra of Galaxies via Penalized Likelihood (2003, methodology): “…of the LOSVD by using them to extract the stellar kinematics from SAURON (Bacon et al. 2001) integral-field spectroscopic observations of the galaxy NGC 3384 (see de Zeeuw et al. 2002 for a description of the observations), which has a rather low velocity dispersion over the whole observed field.”
• The ATLAS3D Project – XXVIII. Dynamically driven star formation suppression in early-type galaxies (2014, background): “T09 studied the 24µm emission of 18 CO non-detected elliptical galaxies from theSAURON galaxy sample (de Zeeuw et al. 2002; a subset of the sample studied here).”
• AINUR: Atlas of Images of NUclear Rings (2009, background): “Counterrotating components have been reported in NGC 4138 (Jore et al. 1996), NGC 4826 (Braun et al. 1992), NGC 7217 (Merrifield & Kuijken 1994) and NGC 7742 (de Zeeuw et al. 2002; Mazzuca et al. 2006).”
• The ATLAS3D project XV: benchmark for early-type galaxies scaling relations from 260 dynamical models: mass-to-light ratio, dark matter, fundamental plane and mass plane (2012, methodology): “…we make use of the SAURON (Bacon et al. 2001) integral-field stellar kinematics within about one half-light radius Re, which was introduced in Emsellem et al. (2004), for the subset of 48 early types in the SAURON survey (de Zeeuw et al. 2002), and in Paper I for the rest of the ATLAS3D sample.”
• OVERVIEW OF THE SDSS-IV MaNGA SURVEY: MAPPING NEARBY GALAXIES AT APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY (2014, background): “Over the past decade, the pioneering work of the SAURON (72 E/S0/Sa galaxies, de Zeeuw et al. 2002) and ATLAS3D surveys (260 E/S0 K-band selected galaxies44, volume-limited within 42 Mpc or z .”
• STECKMAP: STEllar Content and Kinematics from high resolution galactic spectra via Maximum A Posteriori (2005, methodology): “The application of age-dependent kinematics to integral field spectroscopy data from, for example SAURON (Bacon et al. 2001; de Zeeuw et al. 2002), OASIS (McDermid et al. 2004), MUSE (Henault et al. 2003) or MPFS (Chilingarian et al. 2004) could significantly boost the amount of information…”
• A CLASSICAL MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF GALAXIES IN THE SPITZER SURVEY OF STELLAR STRUCTURE IN GALAXIES (S4G) (2015, background): “This galaxy, which is known to exhibit counter-rotation (de Zeeuw et al. 2002), has a single bright inner ring and a much fainter, larger ring that is not likely to be an outer ring.”
• Simulations of binary galaxy mergers and the link with fast rotators, slow rotators, and kinematically distinct cores (2011, methodology): “The SAURON survey (de Zeeuw et al. 2002) has introduced a new view of ETGs, classifying them in two families – the fast and the slow rotators – according not only to their morphology, but also to their kinematics (Cappellari et al. 2007; Emsellem et al. 2007, hereafter E+07; see also Section 2.2.3).”
• Axisymmetric Dynamical Models of the Central Regions of Galaxies (2002, background): “De Zeeuw et al. (2002) and Bacon et al. (2002) present examples of data sets that can be exploited for this analysis.”