Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): mass–size relations of z < 0.1 galaxies subdivided by Sérsic index, colour and morphology

By R. Lange, S. Driver, A. Robotham, Lee S. Kelvin, Alister W. Graham, M. Alpaslan, S. Andrews, I. Baldry, Steven Bamford, Joss Bland-Hawthorn and 13 more. 2014

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use data from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey in the redshift range 0.01 < z < 0.1 (8399 galaxies in g to Ks bands) to derive the stellar mass–half-light radius relations for various divisions of ‘early’- and ‘late’-type samples. We find that the choice of division between early and late (i.e. colour, shape, morphology) is not particularly critical; however, the adopted mass limits and sample selections (i.e. the careful rejection of outliers and use of robust fitting methods) are important. In particular, we note that for samples extending to low stellar mass limits (<1010M⊙) the Sersic index bimodality, evident for high-mass systems, becomes less distinct and no-longer acts as a reliable separator of early- and late-type systems. The final set of stellar mass–half-light radius relations are reported for a variety of galaxy population subsets in 10 bands (ugrizZY JHKs) and are intended to provide a comprehensive low-z benchmark for the many ongoing high-z studies. Exploring the variation of the stellar mass–half-light radius relations with wavelength, we confirm earlier findings that galaxies appear more compact at longer wavelengths albeit at a smaller level than previously noted: at 1010M⊙ both spiral systems and ellipticals show a decrease in size of 13 per cent from g to Ks (which is near linear in log wavelength). Finally, we note that the sizes used in this work are derived from 2D Sersic light profile fitting (using GALFIT3), i.e. elliptical semimajor half-light radii, improving on earlier low-z benchmarks based on circular apertures.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbfa40ee03003b9c6e131aff2a0e678d4f4e5242

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Citations in the corpus

The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, methodology): “The Galaxy and Mass Assembly survey (Driver et al. 2011) includes the largest bulge/disk decomposition survey to date using the Viking K-band imaging survey of 4,300 disk galaxies (Lange et al. 2015).”
SPARC: MASS MODELS FOR 175 DISK GALAXIES WITH SPITZER PHOTOMETRY AND ACCURATE ROTATION CURVES (2016, methodology): “In the top-left panel, the solid line shows the K-band mass-radius relation from the GAMA survey (Lange et al. 2015) for morphologically identified late-type galaxies.”
Size evolution of normal and compact galaxies in the EAGLE simulation (2015, background): “…galaxy sizes are continuously improving, the recovered sizes from the data typically depend, among other things, on the wavelength of the observations (Kelvin et al. 2012; VDW14; Lange et al. 2015), the assumed fitting profile (e.g. Head, Lucey & Hudson 2015) and the surface brightness of galaxies.”
The size evolution of star-forming and quenched galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “Similar considerations guide us with regards to a possible comparison to Lange et al. (2015).”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: calibration of subgrid physics and model variations (2015, background): “Lange et al. (2015) recently exploited the multiband photometry of the GAMA survey to assess the magnitude of this sensitivity, concluding that the observed size of disc galaxies of mass M∗ = 1010 M is typically only ∼10 per cent smaller in the Ks-band (the best proxy for the true stellar mass…”