A catalogue and analysis of local galaxy ages and metallicities

By A. Terlevich, D. Forbes. 2001

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have assembled a catalogue of relative ages, metallicities and abundance ratios for about 150 local galaxies in field, group and cluster environments. The galaxies span morphological types from cD and ellipticals, to late-type spirals. Ages and metallicities were estimated from high-quality published spectral line indices using Worthey & Ottaviani (1997) single stellar population evolutionary models. The identification of galaxy age as a fourth parameter in the fundamental plane (Forbes, Ponman & Brown 1998) is confirmed by our larger sample of ages. We investigate trends between age and metallicity, and with other physical parameters of the galaxies, such as ellipticity, luminosity and kinematic anisotropy. We demonstrate the existence of a galaxy age–metallicity relation similar to that seen for local galactic disc stars, whereby young galaxies have high metallicity, while old galaxies span a large range in metallicities. We also investigate the influence of environment and morphology on the galaxy age and metallicity, especially the predictions made by semi-analytic hierarchical clustering models (HCM). We confirm that non-cluster ellipticals are indeed younger on average than cluster ellipticals as predicted by the HCM models. However we also find a trend for the more luminous galaxies to have a higher [Mg/Fe] ratio than the lower luminosity galaxies, which is opposite to the expectation from HCM models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f711e67694dd954cc3af4b0e24117fb7b5f10bae

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Citations in the corpus

NOAO Fundamental Plane Survey. II. Age and Metallicity along the Red Sequence from Line-Strength Data (2005, background): “These correlated errors complicate the interpretation of the data, potentially generating a spurious age-metallicity correlation (Terlevich & Forbes 2002).”
GCD+: a new chemodynamical approach to modelling supernovae and chemical enrichment in elliptical galaxies (2002, background): “The abundance ratio of [Mg/Fe] of elliptical galaxies has been well-studied by several groups (Worthey, Faber, & Gonzalez 1992; Jørgensen 1999; Kuntschner 2000; Trager et al. 2000b; Terlevich & Forbes 2002).”
The Indo-US Library of Coudé Feed Stellar Spectra (2004, result): “For example, recent results from galaxy population synthesis studies (e.g., Kuntschner et al. 2002, Terlevich & Forbes 2002, Trager et al. 2000, and references therein) indicate that the integrated spectra of most early-type galaxies are dominated by metal-rich stars with nonsolar abundance ratios…”
Spatially resolved spectroscopy of Coma cluster early-type galaxies III. The stellar population gradients ? (2003, methodology): “Similar to Terlevich & Forbes (2002), these studies break the metallicity-age degeneracy by combining pairs of indices with nearly orthogonal dependences on metallicity and age, and are based on simple stellar population models (Worthey 1994, Vazdekis et al. 1996).”
Ages and metallicities of early-type galaxies in the SDSS: new insight into the physical origin of the colour-magnitude and the Mg2-sigmaV relations (2006, background): “Other previous studies also invoked an age-metallicity anticorrelation to explain the tightness of the colour-magnitude and the Mg2–σV relations (e.g., Jørgensen 1999; Ferreras et al. 1999; Trager et al. 2000a; Terlevich & Forbes 2002, but see Kuntschner et al. 2001).”
Hot Gas In and Around Elliptical Galaxies (2003, background): “Young stars in this mass range could explain the high stellar Hβ features that are commonly observed in giant E galaxies (Mathews & Brighenti 1999b; Terlevich & Forbes 2002).”
Environment and self-regulation in galaxy formation (2009, background): “…with a large number of investigations in the literature (Longhetti et al. 2000; Trager et al. 2000a; Poggianti et al. 2001b; Kuntschner et al. 2002; Terlevich & Forbes 2002; Proctor et al. 2004; Denicoló et al. 2005; Mendes de Oliveira et al. 2005; Collobert et al. 2006; Schawinski et al.…”
The ages and metallicities of galaxies in the local universe (2005, background): “11, but for the subsample of 26 003 early-type (C 2.8) SDSS-DR2 galaxies with median S/N per pixel greater than 20. agreement with previous findings of no significant relation between the ages of early-type galaxies and luminosity (Kuntschner 1998; Kuntschner & Davies 1998; Terlevich & Forbes 2002).”
Stellar populations of early-type galaxies in different environments - II. Ages and metallicities (2006, background): “…redshift in a single episode has come into question by several studies of stellar population in these systems which found a high fraction of earlytype galaxies with apparent young ages (e.g. González 1993; Trager et al. 1998; Trager et al. 2000b; Terlevich & Forbes 2002; Sánchez–Blázquez 2004).”
Spatially resolved spectroscopy of early-type galaxies over a range in mass (2007, background): “…the central parts of early-type galaxies and σ (Faber et al. 1992; Worthey, Faber & González 1992; Kuntschner 2000, Jørgensen 1999; Trager et al. 2000b; Terlevich & Forbes 2002; Thomas et al. 2005; Nelan et al. 2005). α-elements and Fe-peak elements are released into the interstellar medium by…”
Galaxy Luminosity Functions to z~1 from DEEP2 and COMBO-17: Implications for Red Galaxy Formation (2005, background): “On the other hand, there is at most a weak trend in stellar age with mass or σ along the red sequence (Trager et al. 2001, Terlevich & Forbes 2002, Bernardi et al. 2005), so that stellar ages and metallicities scatter substantially at every point on all three relations.”
UV-extended E-MILES stellar population models: young components in massive early-type galaxies (2016, background): “…8.43 and 8.45Gyr, respectively), Leonardi & Worthey (2000) for NGC5018 (2.8Gyr), with an errorbar adjusted to match the younger age value provided by Terlevich & Forbes (2002) (i.e. 1.5Gyr), Vazdekis et al. (2004) for NGC5831 (5.9Gyr), and González-Delgado et al. (2015) for NGC7619 (9.77Gyr).”
Near-Infrared Properties of Galaxy Clusters: Luminosity as a Binding Mass Predictor and the State of Cluster Baryons (2003, methodology): “We assume constant metallicities Zstar,Fe = 1.2Z⊙,Fe and 1.8Z⊙,Fe for ellipticals and spirals (Jørgensen 1999; Terlevich & Forbes 2002), respectively, and we weight them by the appropriate stellar mass–to–light ratio, luminosity functions of different morphological types, and the relative abundance…”
A Binary Model for the UV-upturn of Elliptical Galaxies (2006, background): “Moreover, the required low metallicity appears inconsistent with the large metallicity inferred for the majority of stars in elliptical galaxies (Zhou, Véron-Cetty & Véron 1992; Terlevich & Forbes 2002; Thomas et al. 2005).”
Star Formation Histories of Early-Type Galaxies. I. Higher Order Balmer Lines as Age Indicators (2003, methodology): “A more detailed comparison of the two models has been carried out by Kuntschner (2000) and Terlevich & Forbes (2002).”
The formation history of elliptical galaxies (2005, result): “This is in agreement with recent observational results (Terlevich & Forbes 2002; Proctor et al. 2004).”
REVISITING WITH CHANDRA THE SCALING RELATIONS OF THE X-RAY EMISSION COMPONENTS (BINARIES, NUCLEI, AND HOT GAS) OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “When several measurements are available, we take them in order of Thomas et al. (2005), Trager et al. (2000), Terlevich & Forbes (2002), Howell (2005), Gallagher et al. (2008), and McDermid et al. (2006).”