A Population of Compact Elliptical Galaxies Detected with the Virtual Observatory
| Autor: | Chilingarian, Igor, Cayatte, Veronique, Revaz, Yves, Dodonov, Serguei, Durand, Daniel, Durret, Florence, Micol, Alberto, Slezak, Eric |
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| Rok vydání: | 2009 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Science 326:1379-1382,2009 |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1126/science.1175930 |
| Popis: | Compact elliptical galaxies are characterized by small sizes and high stellar densities. They are thought to form through tidal stripping of massive progenitors. However, only a handful of them were known, preventing us from understanding the role played by this mechanism in galaxy evolution. We present a population of 21 compact elliptical galaxies gathered with the Virtual Observatory. Follow-up spectroscopy and data mining, using high-resolution images and large databases, show that all the galaxies exhibit old metal-rich stellar populations different from those of dwarf elliptical galaxies of similar masses but similar to those of more massive early-type galaxies, supporting the tidal stripping scenario. Their internal properties are reproduced by numerical simulations, which result in compact dynamically hot remnants resembling the galaxies in our sample. Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. Science in press, published in Science Express on 1/Oct/2009. Full resolution figures in the supplementary online material are available from the Science Magazine web-site |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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