English

The Fundamental Plane of Bulges at Intermediate Redshift

Astrophysics 2009-11-13 v1

Abstract

We report on a new study aimed at understanding the diversity and evolutionary properties of distant galactic bulges in the context of well-established trends for pure spheroidal galaxies. Bulges have been isolated for a sample of 137 spiral galaxies in the GOODS fields within the redshift range 0.1 < z < 1.2. Using proven photometric techniques we determine for each galaxy the characteristic parameters (size, surface brightness, profile shape) in the 4 GOODS-ACS imaging bands of both the disk and bulge components. Using the DEIMOS spectrograph on Keck, precision stellar velocity dispersions were secured for a sizeable fraction of the bulges. This has enabled us to compare the Fundamental Plane of our distant bulges with that of field spheroidal galaxies in a similar redshift range. Bulges in spiral galaxies with a bulge-to-total luminosity ratio (B/T) > 0.2 show very similar patterns of evolution to those seen for low luminosity spheroidals. To first order, their recent mass assembly histories are equivalent.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0709.1737,
  title  = {The Fundamental Plane of Bulges at Intermediate Redshift},
  author = {Lauren A. MacArthur and Richard S. Ellis and Tommaso Treu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0709.1737},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium 245, "Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Bulges", held at Oxford, U.K., July 2007, Eds. M. Bureau, E. Athanassoula, B. Barbuy

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