Recent deep Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 imaging suggests that a majority of compact quiescent massive galaxies at z~2 may contain disks. To investigate this claim, we have compared the ellipticity distribution of 31 carefully selected high-redshift massive quiescent compact galaxies to a set of mass-selected ellipticity and Sersic index distributions obtained from 2D structural fits to ~40,000$ nearby galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test shows that the distribution of ellipticities for the high-redshift galaxies is consistent with the ellipticity distribution of a similarly chosen sample of massive early-type galaxies. However the distribution of Sersic indices for the high-redshift sample is inconsistent with that of local early-type galaxies, and instead resembles that of local disk-dominated populations. The mismatch between the properties of high-redshift compact galaxies and those of both local early-type and disk-dominated systems leads us to conclude that the basic structures of high-redshift compact galaxies probably do not closely resemble those of any single local galaxy population. Any galaxy population analog to the high-redshift compact galaxies that exists at the current epoch is either a mix of different types of galaxies, or possibly a unique class of objects on their own.
@article{arxiv.1206.3579,
title = {On the Shapes and Structures of High-Redshift Compact Galaxies},
author = {M. Chevance and A. Weijmans and I. Damjanov and R. G. Abraham and L. Simard and S. van den Bergh and E. Caris and K. Glazebrook},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.3579},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
9 pages, 3 figure, accepted for publication in ApJL