Stellar population gradients in galaxy discs from the CALIFA survey - The influence of bars

By P. Sánchez-Blázquez, F. Rosales-Ortega, J. Méndez-Abreu, Isabel Pérez, Sebastián F. Sánchez, S. Zibetti, J. Aguerri, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, C. Catalán-Torrecilla, R. C. Fernandes and 20 more. 2014

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While studies of gasphase metallicity gradients in disc galaxies are common, very little has been done towards the acquisition of stellar abundance gradients in the same regions. We present here a comparative study of the stellar metallicity and age distributions in a sample of 62 nearly face-on, spiral galaxies with and without bars, using data from the CALIFA survey. We measure the slopes of the gradients and study their relation with other properties of the galaxies. We find that the mean stellar age and metallicity gradients in the disc are shallow and negative. Furthermore, when normalized to the effective radius of the disc, the slope of the stellar population gradients does not correlate with the mass or with the morphological type of the galaxies. In contrast to this, the values of both age and metallicity at similar to 2.5 scale lengths correlate with the central velocity dispersion in a similar manner to the central values of the bulges, although bulges show, on average, older ages and higher metallicities than the discs. One of the goals of the present paper is to test the theoretical prediction that non-linear coupling between the bar and the spiral arms is an efficient mechanism for producing radial migrations across significant distances within discs. The process of radial migration should flatten the stellar metallicity gradient with time and, therefore, we would expect flatter stellar metallicity gradients in barred galaxies. However, we do not find any difference in the metallicity or age gradients between galaxies with and without bars. We discuss possible scenarios that can lead to this lack of difference.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca030354eef69e9721a4e98b64d4c51667b6f03e

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Citations in the corpus

OVERVIEW OF THE SDSS-IV MaNGA SURVEY: MAPPING NEARBY GALAXIES AT APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY (2014, background): “In the small samples observed to date, stellar age gradients are negative but shallow among disk galaxies (Sánchez-Blázquez et al. 2014) and flat among early-types (e.g., Mehlert et al. 2003; Sánchez-Blázquez et al. 2006; Kuntschner et al. 2010), although trends consistent with late-time growth…”
The CALIFA survey across the Hubble sequence: Spatially resolved stellar population properties in galaxies (2015, methodology): “Bad pixels (identified by the reduction pipeline) 2 To test the effect of this process in the estimation of ages, we have compared the results for 60 galaxies in common with Sánchez-Blázquez et al. (2014).”