The Centers of Early-Type Galaxies with Hubble Space Telescope. VI. Bimodal Central Surface Brightness Profiles

By Tod R. Lauer, K. Gebhardt, S. Faber, D. Richstone, S. Tremaine, J. Kormendy, M. Aller, R. Bender, A. Dressler, A. Filippenko and 2 more. 2006

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We combine several HST investigations on the central structure of early-type galaxies to generate a large sample of surface photometry. The studies selected were those that used the "Nuker law" to characterize the inner light distributions of the galaxies. The sample comprises WFPC1 and WFPC2 V-band observations published earlier by our group, R-band WFPC2 photometry of Rest et al., NICMOS H-band photometry by Ravindranath et al. and Quillen et al., and the brightest cluster galaxy WFPC2 I-band photometry of Laine et al. The distribution of the logarithmic slopes of the central brightness profiles strongly affirms that the central structure of elliptical galaxies with MV < -19 is bimodal, based on both parametric and nonparametric analysis. At the HST resolution limit, most galaxies are either power-law systems, which have steep cusps in surface brightness, or core systems, which have shallow cusps interior to a steeper envelope brightness distribution. A rapid transition between the two forms occurs over the luminosity range -22 < MV < -20, with cores dominating at the highest luminosities and power laws at the lowest. There are a few "intermediate" systems that have both cusp slopes and total luminosities that fall within the core/power-law transition, but they are rare and do not fill in the overall bimodal distribution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. M. Cappellari
3. L. Hernquist
4. Thomas J. Cox
5. T. Naab
6. R. Somerville
7. E. Quataert
8. D. Keres̆

In Instrumentation

1. M. Cappellari
2. P. Hopkins
3. L. Hernquist
4. Thomas J. Cox
5. R. Somerville
6. T. Naab
7. J. Kormendy
8. D. Keres̆

Citations in the corpus

• The effects of gas on morphological transformation in mergers: implications for bulge and disc demographics (2009, background): “Considering a large sample of ellipticals and recent merger remnants (Rothberg & Joseph 2004; Lauer et al. 2007; Kormendy et al. 2009), the mass fraction of spheroids in the dissipational component appears, to lowest order, to trace typical disc gas fractions as a function of mass; however, Hopkins…”
• REVISITING THE SCALING RELATIONS OF BLACK HOLE MASSES AND HOST GALAXY PROPERTIES (2012, background): “…et al. (2007a). f The literature contains two inconsistent estimates of the V -band bulge luminosity of NGC 4564: MV = −19.60 in G09, and MV = −20.26 in Lauer et al. (2007a). g Bulge luminosities for NGC 4736 and NGC 4826 were included in the sample of McConnell et al. (2011a) and their fit to the…”
• DISSIPATION AND EXTRA LIGHT IN GALACTIC NUCLEI. IV. EVOLUTION IN THE SCALING RELATIONS OF SPHEROIDS (2008, background): “Selection effects (Lauer et al. 2007a) would be expected to explain the difference between some observational estimates that infer very strong (e.g. Walter et al. 2004) or rapid low-redshift (Woo et al. 2006) evolution and our predictions.”
• DISSIPATION AND EXTRA LIGHT IN GALACTIC NUCLEI. II. “CUSP” ELLIPTICALS (2008, methodology): “Although the composite profiles were used in Lauer et al. (2007a) to estimate effective radii, they were not actually shown in the paper.”
• The ATLAS3D project – XX. Mass–size and mass–σ distributions of early-type galaxies: bulge fraction drives kinematics, mass-to-light ratio, molecular gas fraction and stellar initial mass function (2012, background): “…al. 2009b), nearly all have flat (core/deficit) central surface brightness profiles (Faber et al. 1997; Graham & Guzmán 2003; Ferrarese et al. 2006; Lauer et al. 2007b), they deviate from power-law colour–magnitude relations (Baldry et al. 2004; Ferrarese et al. 2006; Bernardi et al. 2011) and…”
• How do massive black holes get their gas (2009, background): “B1) significantly exceeds the highest nuclear densities observed in any cusp ellipticals (Ferrarese et al. 2006b; Lauer et al. 2007; Kormendy et al. 2009) or for that matter any nuclear star clusters, globular clusters, nuclear discs or other highdensity stellar systems (Hopkins et al. 2010).”
• MERGERS AND BULGE FORMATION IN ΛCDM: WHICH MERGERS MATTER? (2009, methodology): “…et al. (2009a,e, 2008a) develop and test an empirical method to estimate the dissipational mass fraction in observed local el- lipticals, and apply this to a wide range of observed ellipticals with a combination of HST and ground-based data from Kormendy et al. (2009) and Lauer et al. (2007).”
• An analytic model of angular momentum transport by gravitational torques: from galaxies to massive black holes (2010, result): “We find reasonable consistency with our simulation results and the profiles of observed cusp ellipticals by taking ηb ≈ ηd ≈ 1/2 over this radial range (see e.g. Lauer et al. 2007; Hopkins et al. 2009a).”
• Discriminating Between the Physical Processes that Drive Spheroid Size Evolution (2009, methodology): “…most massive, first-toassemble high-redshift systems) appear to lie significantly above the Shen et al. (2003) size–mass relation for more recently assembled field galaxies (see e.g. Batcheldor et al. 2007; Bernardi et al. 2007; Lauer et al. 2007c; von der Linden et al. 2007; Kormendy et al. 2009).”
• A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies. II. Formation of Red Ellipticals (2007, background): “It is well established that there is a general dichotomy in the properties of elliptical galaxies (e.g., Bender et al. 1992, 1993; Kormendy1977;Kormendy et al. 2007; Lauer et al. 2007).”
• STRUCTURE AND FORMATION OF ELLIPTICAL AND SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES (2008, methodology): “…et al. (1991); Kormendy et al. (1994, 1996a); Lauer et al. (1995); Kormendy & Bender (1996); Tremblay & Merritt (1996); Gebhardt et al. (1996); Faber et al. (1997); Rest et al. (2001), Ravindranath et al. (2001); Lauer et al. (2005, 2007b); Emsellem et al. (2007), and Cappellari et al. (2007).”
• DETAILED DECOMPOSITION OF GALAXY IMAGES. II. BEYOND AXISYMMETRIC MODELS (2009, background): “…(Kormendy 1985, 1987), the central structure of early-type galaxies (Kormendy 1985; Lauer et al. 1995; Faber et al. 1997; Ferrarese et al. 2006b,a; Lauer et al. 2007) and implications for the formation of massive black holes (Ravindranath et al. 2002; Kormendy & Bender 2009), black hole vs. bulge…”
• Compact high-redshift galaxies are the cores of the most massive present-day spheroids (2009, methodology): “In detail, we take the observed stellar mass function of spheroids (Bell et al. 2003), and at each mass convolve with the distribution of surface density profiles from Kormendy et al. (2008) and Lauer et al. (2007) for systems of the same mass, to determine the resulting mass function Figure 4.”
• Rates of stellar tidal disruption as probes of the supermassive black hole mass function (2014, methodology): “We find that the HST photometry of Lauer et al. (2007) is able to resolve rcrit for a large majority of galaxies in our sample, including almost every galaxy with M• > 107M .”