The baryonic halos of isolated elliptical galaxies
Abstract
Without the interference of a number of events, galaxies may suffer in crowded environments (e.g., stripping, harassment, strangulation); isolated elliptical galaxies provide a control sample for the study of galaxy formation. We present the study of a sample of isolated ellipticals using imaging from a variety of telescopes, focusing on their globular cluster systems as tracers of their stellar halos. Our main findings are: (a) GC color bimodality is common even in the most isolated systems; (b) the specific frequency of GCs is fairly constant with galaxy mass, without showing an increase towards high-mass systems like in the case of cluster ellipticals; (c) on the other hand, the red fraction of GCs follows the same inverted V shape trend with mass as seen in cluster ellipticals; and (d) the stellar halos show low S\'ersic indices which are consistent with a major merger origin.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1708.06515,
title = {The baryonic halos of isolated elliptical galaxies},
author = {Ricardo Salinas and Adebusola Alabi and Nicklas Hammar and Tom Richtler and Richard R. Lane and Mischa Schirmer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.06515},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
5 pages. Published in the special issue of Galaxies, "On the Origin (and Evolution) of Baryonic Galaxy Halos"