The ATLAS3D project - XXIX. The new look of early-type galaxies and surrounding fields disclosed by extremely deep optical images

By Pierre-Alain Duc, J. Cuillandre, Emin Karabal, M. Cappellari, K. Alatalo, L. Blitz, Frédéric Bournaud, M. Bureau, A. Crocker, Roger Davies and 17 more. 2014

234 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Galactic archaeology based on star counts is instrumental to reconstruct the past mass assembly of Local Group galaxies. The development of new observing techniques and data reduction, coupled with the use of sensitive large field of view cameras, now allows us to pursue this technique in more distant galaxies exploiting their diffuse low surface brightness (LSB) light. As part of the ATLAS^(3D) project, we have obtained with the MegaCam camera at the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope extremely deep, multiband images of nearby early-type galaxies (ETGs). We present here a catalogue of 92 galaxies from the ATLAS^(3D) sample, which are located in low- to medium-density environments. The observing strategy and data reduction pipeline, which achieve a gain of several magnitudes in the limiting surface brightness with respect to classical imaging surveys, are presented. The size and depth of the survey are compared to other recent deep imaging projects. The paper highlights the capability of LSB-optimized surveys at detecting new prominent structures that change the apparent morphology of galaxies. The intrinsic limitations of deep imaging observations are also discussed, among those, the contamination of the stellar haloes of galaxies by extended ghost reflections, and the cirrus emission from Galactic dust. The detection and systematic census of fine structures that trace the present and past mass assembly of ETGs are one of the prime goals of the project. We provide specific examples of each type of observed structures – tidal tails, stellar streams and shells – and explain how they were identified and classified. We give an overview of the initial results. The detailed statistical analysis will be presented in future papers.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db85dea640ec9ea5ebab49b1e153ffd8f3dfeae7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. M. Volonteri
2. Y. Dubois
3. C. Pichon
4. J. Devriendt
5. Jenny E. Greene
6. L. Hernquist
7. M. Strauss
8. Sébastien Peirani

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

1. Jenny E. Greene
2. C. Pichon
3. M. Cappellari
4. M. Sarzi
5. J. Falc'on-Barroso

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. M. Cappellari
2. M. Strauss
3. Robert Lupton
4. Jenny E. Greene
5. M. Volonteri
6. Y. Komiyama

Citations in the corpus

• Illuminating Low Surface Brightness Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “Ferrarese et al. 2012; Duc et al. 2015; Fliri & Trujillo 2016; Trujillo & Fliri 2016).”
• Structure and Kinematics of Early-Type Galaxies from Integral Field Spectroscopy (2016, background): “In some cases faint spiral arms become visible in ETGs with very deep optical (Duc et al. 2011, 2015) or HI observations (Serra et al. 2012).”
• The Horizon-AGN Simulation: Morphological Diversity of Galaxies ,Promoted by AGN Feedback (2016, background): “This view is supported by direct observational evidence, where disturbed features are commonly witnessed for all morphological types (Schweizer & Seitzer 1988; van Dokkum 2005; Duc et al. 2015).”