The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. II. Stellar Populations and Internal Structure of Early-Type Lens Galaxies

By T. Treu, Leon V. E. Koopmans, A. Bolton, S. Burles, L. A. Moustakas. 2005

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We use HST images to derive effective radii and effective surface brightnesses of 15 early-type (E+S0) lens galaxies identified by the SLACS Survey. Our measurements are combined with stellar velocity dispersions from the SDSS database to investigate for the first time the distribution of lens galaxies in the fundamental plane (FP) space. Accounting for selection effects (top priority to the largest Einstein radii and thus approximately to the largest velocity dispersions, σ ≳ 240 km s-1) and for passive evolution, the distribution of the lens galaxies inside the FP is indistinguishable from that of the parent sample of SDSS galaxies. We conclude that SLACS lenses are a fair sample of high velocity dispersion E+S0s. By comparing the central stellar velocity dispersion (σ) with the velocity dispersion that best fits the lensing models (σSIE) we find ⟨fSIE⟩ ≡ ⟨σ/σSIE⟩ = 1.01 ± 0.02 with 0.065 rms scatter. We infer that within the Einstein radii (typically Re/2) the SLACS lenses are very well approximated by isothermal ellipsoids, requiring a fine tuning of the stellar and dark matter distribution (the bulge-halo ``conspiracy''). Interpreting the offset from the local FP in terms of evolution of the stellar mass-to-light ratio, we find d log(M/LB)/dz = -0.69 ± 0.08 (rms 0.11) consistent with the rate found for field E+S0s and with most of the stars being old (zf > 2) and less than ~10% of the stellar mass having formed below z = 1. We discuss our results in the context of formation mechanisms such as collisionless (``dry'') mergers.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ecd59906135cd614033670fbdf336c19e158f5f4

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Citations in the corpus

THE DENSITY PROFILES OF MASSIVE, RELAXED GALAXY CLUSTERS. I. THE TOTAL DENSITY OVER THREE DECADES IN RADIUS (2012, background): “The results we present for BCGs are quite different from observations of massive field ellipticals, which uniformly show a total density slope within their effective radii that is nearly isothermal (ρtot ∝ r−2; Treu et al. 2006; Koopmans et al. 2009; Auger et al. 2009).”
Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, methodology): “The SLACS gravitational lenses (Bolton et al. 2006a; Treu et al. 2006; Koopmans et al. 2006; Gavazzi et al. 2007; Bolton et al. 2008a; Gavazzi et al. 2008; Bolton et al. 2008b; Auger et al. 2009; Treu et al. 2009; Auger et al. 2010a; Newton et al. 2011) were selected from the spectroscopic database…”
Bayesian strong gravitational-lens modelling on adaptive grids: objective detection of mass substructure in Galaxies (2008, methodology): “A set of simulated data with realistic noise is generated from a model based on the real lens SLACS J1627−0055 (Koopmans et al. 2006; Bolton et al. 2006; Treu et al. 2006).”
One Law to Rule Them All: The Radial Acceleration Relation of Galaxies (2016, background): “Similarly, the total surface density profiles of ETGs are nearly isothermal, leading to flat rotation curves and a “bulge-halo conspiracy” (e.g., Treu et al. 2006; Humphrey et al. 2012; Cappellari et al. 2015).”
THE INITIAL MASS FUNCTION OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, unknown): “To meet our goal we exploit the large and homogeneous sample of strong gravitational lenses discovered by the Sloan Lenses ACS Survey (Bolton et al. 2006; Treu et al. 2006; Koopmans et al. 2006; Gavazzi et al. 2007; Bolton et al. 2008a; Gavazzi et al. 2008; Bolton et al. 2008b; Auger et al. 2009).”
LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products (2008, background): “• Search for strong gravitational lenses to a faint surface brightness limit (e.g., Bartelmann et al. 1998; Tyson, Kochanski & Dell’Antonio 1998; Belokurov et al. 2007b), which can be used to explore the dark matter profiles of galaxies (e.g., Treu et al. 2006).”
THE RISE AND FALL OF PASSIVE DISK GALAXIES: MORPHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION ALONG THE RED SEQUENCE REVEALED BY COSMOS (2009, background): “While the red sequence abundance grows with time (e.g., Bundy et al. 2006; Borch et al. 2006), passive disks always dominate at lower masses which is also where the newest arrivals to the red sequence can be found (e.g., Treu et al. 2006).”
DISSECTING THE GRAVITATIONAL LENS B1608+656. II. PRECISION MEASUREMENTS OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT, SPATIAL CURVATURE, AND THE DARK ENERGY EQUATION OF STATE (2009, background): “Recent studies such as the Sloan Lens ACS Survey (SLACS) and hydrostatic Xray analyses found that the sum of these internal components can be well-described by a power law (e.g. Treu et al. 2006; Koopmans et al. 2006; Gavazzi et al. 2007; Koopmans et al. 2009; Humphrey & Buote 2009).”
THE SLOAN LENS ACS SURVEY. IX. COLORS, LENSING, AND STELLAR MASSES OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2009, methodology): “The advent of the Sloan Lens ACS Survey (SLACS; Bolton et al. 2006; Treu et al. 2006; Koopmans et al. 2006; Gavazzi et al. 2007; Bolton et al. 2008; Gavazzi et al. 2008; Bolton et al. 2008; Treu et al. 2009, papers I-VIII, respectively) has made this type of modeling feasible for the first time for…”
TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles (2020, background): “However, Treu et al. (2006) show that, at fixed velocity dispersion, the SLACS sample is indistinguishable from other elliptical galaxies.”
The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. VI. Discovery and Analysis of a Double Einstein Ring (2008, methodology): “Such a similarity is consistent with the results of previous SLACS studies (Treu et al. 2006; Koopmans et al. 2006).”
THE SLOAN LENS ACS SURVEY. X. STELLAR, DYNAMICAL, AND TOTAL MASS CORRELATIONS OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “The SLACS lens galaxies have previously been shown to lie on the Fundamental Plane (Treu et al. 2006; Bolton et al. 2008b) and on the Mass Plane (Bolton et al. 2007, 2008b).”
Two-dimensional kinematics of SLACS lenses – III. Mass structure and dynamics of early-type lens galaxies beyond z ≃ 0.1 (2011, background): “…also act as strong gravitational lenses, has been remedi d by the Sloan Lens ACS Survey, SLACS (Bolton et al. 2006, 2008a, 2008b, Koopmans et al. 2006, Treu et al. 2006, 2009, Gavazzi et al. 2007, 2008, Auger et al. 2009, 2010a), which has yielded a large sample of almost a hundred such objects.”
Radiative Feedback from Massive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies: AGN Flaring and Central Starburst Fueled by Recycled Gas (2007, background): “Theoretical (e.g., Dubinski &Carlberg 1991; Ciotti & Pellegrini1992; Navarro et al. 1997; Fukushige & Makino 1997) and observational (e.g., Treu et al. 2006) arguments support the idea that, similarly to the stellar profiles, the radial density distribution of the dark halos is described by a cuspy…”
The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. IV. The Mass Density Profile of Early-Type Galaxies out to 100 Effective Radii (2007, methodology): “We checked that our results are consistent with those of paper II for the 10 lenses previously observed with shallower HST snapshot imaging (see corrected table 2 of paper II in Treu et al. 2006b).”