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Register a new userThe Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury. Progression of Large-Scale Star Formation across Space and Time in M31
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Added by
Dimitrios Gouliermis
Publication date
2014
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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We investigate the clustering of early-type stars younger than 300 Myr on galactic scales in M31. Based on the stellar photometric catalogs of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury program that also provides stellar parameters derived from the individual energy distributions, our analysis is focused on the young stars in three star-forming regions, located at galactocentric distances of about 5, 10, and 15 kpc, corresponding to the inner spiral arms, the ring structure, and the outer arm, respectively. We apply the two-point correlation function to our selected sample to investigate the clustering behavior of these stars across different time- and length-scales. We find that young stellar structure survives across the whole extent of M31 longer than 300 Myr. Stellar distribution in all regions appears to be self-similar, with younger stars being systematically more strongly clustered than the older, which are more dispersed. The observed clustering is interpreted as being induced by turbulence, the driving source for which is probably gravitational instabilities driven by the spiral arms, which are stronger closer to the galactic centre.
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We map the star formation history across M31 by fitting stellar evolution models to color-magnitude diagrams of each 83${times}$83$$ (0.3$times$1.4 kpc, deprojected) region of the PHAT survey outside of the innermost 6${times}$12$$ portion. We find that most of the star formation occurred prior to $sim$8 Gyr ago, followed by a relatively quiescent period until $sim$4 Gyr ago, a subsequent star formation episode about 2 Gyr ago and a return to relative quiescence. There appears to be little, if any, structure visible for populations with ages older than 2 Gyr, suggesting significant mixing since that epoch. Finally, assuming a Kroupa IMF from 0.1$-$100 M$_{odot}$, we find that the total amount of star formation over the past 14 Gyr in the area over which we have fit models is 5${times}$10$^{10}$ M$_{odot}$. Fitting the radial distribution of this star formation and assuming azimuthal symmetry, (1.5$pm$0.2)${times}$10$^{11}$ M$_{odot}$ of stars have formed in the M31 disk as a whole, (9$pm$2)${times}$10$^{10}$ M$_{odot}$ of which has likely survived to the present after accounting for evolutionary effects. This mass is about one fifth of the total dynamical mass of M31.
We present synthetic far- and near-ultraviolet (FUV and NUV) maps of M31, both with and without dust reddening. These maps were constructed from spatially-resolved star formation histories (SFHs) derived from optical Hubble Space Telescope imaging of resolved stars, taken as part of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury program. We use stellar population synthesis modeling to generate synthetic UV maps with projected spatial resolution of $sim$100 pc ($sim$24 arcseconds) The predicted UV flux agrees well with the observed flux, with median ratios between the modeled and observed flux of $log_{10}(f^{syn}/f^{obs}) = 0.03pm0.24$ and $-0.03pm0.16$ in the FUV and NUV, respectively. This agreement is particularly impressive given that we used only optical photometry to construct these UV maps. We use the dust-free maps to examine properties of obscured flux and star formation by comparing our reddened and dust-free FUV flux maps with the observed FUV and FUV+24{mu}m flux to examine the fraction of obscured flux. The synthetic flux maps require that $sim$90% of the FUV flux in M31 is obscured by dust, while the GALEX-based methods suggest that $sim$70% of the flux is obscured. This increase in the obscured flux estimate is driven by significant differences between the dust-free synthetic FUV flux and that derived when correcting the observed FUV for dust with 24{mu}m observations. The difference is further illustrated when we compare the SFRs derived from the FUV+24{mu}m flux with the 100 Myr average SFR from the SFHs. The 24{mu}m-corrected FUV flux underestimates the SFR by a factor of $sim$2.3 - 2.5. [abridged]
We present a study of spatial variations in the metallicity of old red giant branch stars in the Andromeda galaxy. Photometric metallicity estimates are derived by interpolating isochrones for over seven million stars in the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) survey. This is the first systematic study of stellar metallicities over the inner 20 kpc of Andromedas galactic disk. We see a clear metallicity gradient of $-0.020pm0.004$ dex/kpc from $sim4-20$ kpc assuming a constant RGB age. This metallicity gradient is derived after correcting for the effects of photometric bias and completeness and dust extinction and is quite insensitive to these effects. The unknown age gradient in M31s disk creates the dominant systematic uncertainty in our derived metallicity gradient. However, spectroscopic analyses of galaxies similar to M31 show that they typically have small age gradients that make this systematic error comparable to the 1$sigma$ error on our metallicity gradient measurement. In addition to the metallicity gradient, we observe an asymmetric local enhancement in metallicity at radii of 3-6 kpc that appears to be associated with Andromedas elongated bar. This same region also appears to have an enhanced stellar density and velocity dispersion.
The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) is an on-going HST Multicycle Treasury program to image ~1/3 of M31s star forming disk in 6 filters, from the UV to the NIR. The full survey will resolve the galaxy into more than 100 million stars with projected radii from 0-20 kpc over a contiguous 0.5 square degree area in 828 orbits, producing imaging in the F275W and F336W filters with WFC3/UVIS, F475W and F814W with ACS/WFC, and F110W and F160W with WFC3/IR. The resulting wavelength coverage gives excellent constraints on stellar temperature, bolometric luminosity, and extinction for most spectral types. The photometry reaches SNR=4 at F275W=25.1, F336W=24.9, F475W=27.9, F814W=27.1, F110W=25.5, and F160W=24.6 for single pointings in the uncrowded outer disk; however, the optical and NIR data are crowding limited, and the deepest reliable magnitudes are up to 5 magnitudes brighter in the inner bulge. All pointings are dithered and produce Nyquist-sampled images in F475W, F814W, and F160W. We describe the observing strategy, photometry, astrometry, and data products, along with extensive tests of photometric stability, crowding errors, spatially-dependent photometric biases, and telescope pointing control. We report on initial fits to the structure of M31s disk, derived from the density of RGB stars, in a way that is independent of the assumed M/L and is robust to variations in dust extinction. These fits also show that the 10 kpc ring is not just a region of enhanced recent star formation, but is instead a dynamical structure containing a significant overdensity of stars with ages >1 Gyr. (Abridged)
As part of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) multi-cycle program, we observed a 12 times 6.5 area of the bulge of M31 with the WFC3/UVIS filters F275W and F336W. From these data we have assembled a sample of sim4000 UV-bright, old stars, vastly larger than previously available. We use updated Padova stellar evolutionary tracks to classify these hot stars into three classes: Post-AGB stars (P-AGB), Post-Early AGB (PE-AGB) stars and AGB-manque stars. P-AGB stars are the end result of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase and are expected in a wide range of stellar populations, whereas PE-AGB and AGB-manque (together referred to as the hot post-horizontal branch; HP-HB) stars are the result of insufficient envelope masses to allow a full AGB phase, and are expected to be particularly prominent at high helium or {alpha} abundances when the mass loss on the RGB is high. Our data support previous claims that most UV-bright sources in the bulge are likely hot (extreme) horizontal branch stars (EHB) and their progeny. We construct the first radial profiles of these stellar populations, and show that they are highly centrally concentrated, even more so than the integrated UV or optical light. However, we find that this UV-bright population does not dominate the total UV luminosity at any radius, as we are detecting only the progeny of the EHB stars that are the likely source of the UVX. We calculate that only a few percent of MS stars in the central bulge can have gone through the HP-HB phase and that this percentage decreases strongly with distance from the center. We also find that the surface density of hot UV-bright stars has the same radial variation as that of low-mass X-ray binaries. We discuss age, metallicity, and abundance variations as possible explanations for the observed radial variation in the UV-bright population.
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