The Stellar Populations of Early-Type Galaxies in the Fornax Cluster

By H. Kuntschner. 2000

253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

AbstractWe have measured central line strengths for a complete sample of early-type galaxies in the Fornax Cluster comprising 11 elliptical and 11 lenticular galaxies, more luminous than MB=–17. We find that the centres of Fornax ellipticals follow the locus of galaxies of fixed age in Worthey's models and have metallicities varying roughly from half to 2.5 times solar. The centres of (relatively low luminosity) lenticular galaxies, however, exhibit a substantial spread to younger luminosity-weighted ages indicating amore extended star formation history. Our conclusions are based on two age/metallicity diagnostic diagrams in the Lick/IDS system comprising established indices such as [MgFe]and Hβ as well as new and more sensitive indices, such as Fe3and H $${\text{H}}_\alpha$$ . The inferred difference in the age distribution between lenticular and elliptical galaxies is a robust conclusion as the models generate consistent relative ages using different age and metallicity indicators even though the absolute ages remain uncertain. The absolute age uncertainty is caused mainly by the effects of non-solar abundance ratios, which are not accounted for in the stellar population models. We find that Es are generally overabundant in magnesium and the most luminous galaxies show stronger overabundances. The luminosity-weighted stellar populations of young S0s are consistent with solar abundance ratios or a weak Mg under abundance. Two of the faintest lenticular galaxies in our sample have blue continua and extremely strong Balmer-line absorptions suggesting starbursts <2 Gyr ago.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe6d4109a4f919d08840e051c03fe9d8345689f8

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Citations in the corpus

Near-infrared line-strengths in elliptical galaxies: evidence for initial mass function variations? (2002, background): “…of the Fe line-strengths among Es are not negligible (e.g. Gorgas, Efstathiou & AragónSalamanca 1990; González 1993; Davies, Sadler & Peletier 1993; Kuntschner 2000), one should not expect the small variation of the Ca ii triplet strength reported by previous work (Cohen 1979; Bica & Alloin…”
Modeling the Panchromatic Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies (2013, background): “It has long been appreciated that a clean separation of age and metallicity can be achieved with Lick indices only for data of very high S/N (& 100/Å; Trager et al. 2000b, Kuntschner 2000).”
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).”
Evolutionary stellar population synthesis with MILES – I. The base models and a new line index system (2010, methodology): “0Å, or to correct his/her measurements to a total broadening of 8.4 Å(FWHM) using polynomials (see, e.g., Kuntschner 2000; Sánchez-Blázquez et al. 2006a).”
Population Synthesis in the Blue. IV. Accurate Model Predictions for Lick Indices and UBV Colors in Single Stellar Populations (2007, background): “…that earlytype galaxies have a large spread in mean ages, hinting at the presence of an intermediate age component in their stellar populations (e.g., Trager et al. 2000, Kuntschner 2000, Caldwell, Rose & Concannon 2003, Denicoló et al. 2005, Thomas et al. 2005, Mendes de Oliveira et al. 2005).”
The SAURON project - VI. Line strength maps of 48 elliptical and lenticular galaxies (2006, background): “For lower velocity dispersions, there is evidence for an increased scatter (see also e.g. Kuntschner 2000; Caldwell, Rose & Concannon 2003).”
Measuring Distances and Probing the Unresolved Stellar Populations of Galaxies Using Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuations (2002, methodology): “Kuntschner (2000) used a single aperture size for the Fornax Cluster galaxies.”
Determining the Properties and Evolution of Red Galaxies from the Quasar Luminosity Function (2005, background): “…that of changing mean spheroid ages with mass (as demonstrated in § 6 and § 7 below), as e.g. even for the extreme case of the evolution reported by Kuntschner (2000), with [Fe/H] = 0.56 log(σ/100kms−1), this results in only a change from Z ∼ 0.8Z⊙ at Msph ∼ 5× 107M⊙ to Z ∼ 2.2Z⊙ at Msph ∼ 2×…”
Environment and self-regulation in galaxy formation (2009, background): “…of early-type galaxies were explicitly derived, no evidence for a correlation with mass, luminosity or velocity dispersion was found (Jørgensen 1999; Kuntschner 2000; Trager et al. 2000a; Kuntschner et al. 2001; Poggianti et al. 2001a,b; Vazdekis et al. 2001; Terlevich & Forbes 2002; Mehlert et…”
Empirical calibration of the near-infrared Ca II triplet — IV. The stellar population synthesis models (2003, background): “…(like the colour–magnitude or Mg2–σ relations (Bower, Lucey & Ellis 1992; Bender, Burstein & Faber 1993; Colless et al. 1999; Terlevich et al. 1999; Kuntschner 2000, hereafter K00; Trager et al. 2000b, hereafter T00; Proctor & Sansom 2002, hereafter PS02), are some of the main issues in the…”
Dry Mergers in GEMS: The Dynamical Evolution of Massive Early-Type Galaxies (2005, unknown): “Furthermore, faint early-type galaxies at the present day can have important contributions from younger stars (Kuntschner 2000; Trager et al. 2000; Thomas et al. 2005).”
IMPROVED AND QUALITY-ASSESSED EMISSION AND ABSORPTION LINE MEASUREMENTS IN SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY GALAXIES (2011, methodology): “…models have been effectively used to study galaxy properties, such as : luminosity-weighted ages, metallicities and abundance ratios of early-type galaxies (Davies, Sadler & Peletier 1993; Fisher, Franx & Illingworth 1995, 1996; Jorgensen, I. 1999; Kuntschner 2000; Kuntschner et al. 2006).”
On the dependence of spectroscopic indices of early-type galaxies on age, metallicity and velocity dispersion (2000, methodology): “For example, if in the presence of NSAR, Mg b is used as a metallicity indicator, the mean inferred ages are younger and the mean metallicities are larger than what would be the case if <Fe> is used (see e.g., Worthey 1998, Kuntschner 2000).”
The ages and metallicities of galaxies in the local universe (2005, background): “…increasing to 50 per cent (instead of 10 per cent) the fraction of models that can 5 It has been noted that higher order Balmer lines can yield younger ages than those predicted by Hβ, presumably because of the dependence of higher order lines on α/Fe (e.g. Kuntschner 2000; Eisenstein et al. 2003).”
Empirical calibration of the near-infrared Ca ii triplet — I. The stellar library and index definition (2001, background): “…(like the colour–magnitude or Mg2–σ relations; Bower, Lucey & Ellis 1992; Bender, Burstein & Faber 1993; Pedraz et al. 1999; Terlevich et al. 1999; Kuntschner 2000; Trager et al. 2000b), are some of the main issues in the present debate about the evolutionary status of early-type galaxies.”
The New Galaxy: Signatures of Its Formation (2002, background): “For galaxies in the Fornax cluster, Kuntschner (2000) finds the opposite effect: a large spread in metallicity is present with little variation in age.”
Spatially resolved spectroscopy of Coma cluster early-type galaxies III. The stellar population gradients ? (2003, unknown): “Still, 〈Fe〉 seems to be weakly correlated with σ (see also Kuntschner 2000).”
Early-Type Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. IV. Colors and Chemical Evolution (2003, background): “Kuntschner (2000) shows that the galaxies in the Fornax Cluster follow this same scaling, although the scatter he finds is 0.011 mag.”
The SAURON project – I. The panoramic integral-field spectrograph (2001, methodology): “All index measurements are then corrected for internal velocity broadening of the galaxies (e.g., Kuntschner 2000) using an ‘optimal stellar template’ and the velocity dispersion derived from each individual spectrum (see § 5.1).”