No Arabic abstract
(abridged) This study revolves around dmB, a new distance- and extinction-independent measure of the contribution by stellar populations older than 9 Gyr to the mean r-band surface brightness of the bulge component in 135 late-type galaxies (LTGs) from the CALIFA survey, spanning a range of 2.6 dex and 3 dex in total and bulge stellar mass (M*T~10^(8.9-11.5) M_solar and M*B~10^(8.3-11.3) M_solar, respectively). The main insight from this study is that LTG bulges form a continuous sequence of increasing dmB with increasing M*T, M*B, stellar mass surface density S* and mass-weighted age and metallicity: high-dmB bulges are the oldest, densest and most massive ones, and vice versa. Furthermore, we find that the bulge-to-disk age and metallicity contrast, as well as the bulge-to-disk mass ratio increase with M*T, raising from, respectively, ~0 Gyr, 0 dex and 0.25 to ~3 Gyr, ~0.3 dex and 0.67 across the mass range covered by our sample. Whereas gas excitation in lower-mass bulges is invariably dominated by star formation (SF), LINER- and Seyfert-specific emission-line ratios were exclusively documented in high-mass, high-S* bulges. The continuity both in the properties of LTG bulges themselves and in their age and metallicity contrast to their parent disks suggests that these components evolve alongside in a concurrent process that leads to a continuum of physical and evolutionary characteristics. Our results are consistent with a picture where bulge growth in LTGs is driven by a superposition of quick-early and slow-secular processes, the relative importance of which increases with M*T. These processes, which presumably combine in situ SF in the bulge and inward migration of material from the disk, are expected to lead to a non-homologous radial growth of S* and a trend for an increasing Sersic index with increasing galaxy mass.
We present a new database of our two-dimensional bulge-disk decompositions for 14,233 galaxies drawn from SDSS DR12 in order to examine the properties of bulges residing in the local universe ($0.005 < z < 0.05$). We performed decompositions in $g$ and $r$ bands by utilizing the {sc{galfit}} software. The bulge colors and bulge-to-total ratios are found to be sensitive to the details in the decomposition technique, and hence we hereby provide full details of our method. The $g-r$ colors of bulges derived are almost constantly red regardless of bulge size except for the bulges in the low bulge-to-total ratio galaxies ($B/T_{rm r} lesssim 0.3$). Bulges exhibit similar scaling relations to those followed by elliptical galaxies, but the bulges in galaxies with lower bulge-to-total ratios clearly show a gradually larger departure in slope from the elliptical galaxy sequence. The scatters around the scaling relations are also larger for the bulges in galaxies with lower bulge-to-total ratios. Both the departure in slopes and larger scatters are likely originated from the presence of young stars. The bulges in galaxies with low bulge-to-total ratios show signs of a frosting of young stars so substantial that their luminosity-weighted Balmer-line ages are as small as 1,Gyr in some cases. While bulges seem largely similar in optical properties to elliptical galaxies, they do show clear and systematic departures as a function of bulge-to-total ratio. The stellar properties and perhaps associated formation processes of bulges seem much more diverse than those of elliptical galaxies.
We investigate the stellar kinematics of the bulge and disk components in 826 galaxies with a wide range of morphology from the Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral-field spectroscopy (SAMI) Galaxy Survey. The spatially-resolved rotation velocity (V) and velocity dispersion ($sigma$) of bulge and disk components have been simultaneously estimated using the penalized pixel fitting (pPXF) method with photometrically defined weights for the two components. We introduce a new subroutine of pPXF for dealing with degeneracy in the solutions. We show that the V and $sigma$ distributions in each galaxy can be reconstructed using the kinematics and weights of the bulge and disk components. The combination of two distinct components provides a consistent description of the major kinematic features of galaxies over a wide range of morphological types. We present Tully-Fisher and Faber-Jackson relations showing that the galaxy stellar mass scales with both V and $sigma$ for both components of all galaxy types. We find a tight Faber-Jackson relation even for the disk component. We show that the bulge and disk components are kinematically distinct: (1) the two components show scaling relations with similar slopes, but different intercepts; (2) the spin parameter $lambda_R$ indicates bulges are pressure-dominated systems and disks are supported by rotation; (3) the bulge and disk components have, respectively, low and high values in intrinsic ellipticity. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of the two components explain, at least to first order, the complex kinematic behaviour of galaxies.
The role of the environment on the formation of S0 galaxies is still not well understood, specifically in the outskirts of galaxy clusters. We study eight low-redshift clusters, analyzing galaxy members up to cluster-centric distances $sim2.5,R_{200}$. We perform 2D photometric bulge-disk decomposition in the $g$-, $r$- and $i$-bands from which we identify 469 double-component galaxies. We analyze separately the colors of the bulges and the disks and their dependence on the projected cluster-centric distance and on the local galaxy density. For our sample of cluster S0 galaxies, we find that bulges are redder than their surrounding disks, show a significant color-magnitude trend, and have colors that do not correlate with environment metrics. On the other hand, the disks associated with our cluster S0s become significantly bluer with increasing cluster-centric radius, but show no evidence for a color-magnitude relation. The disk color-radius relation is mainly driven by galaxies in the cluster core at $0leq R/ R_{200}<0.5$. No significant difference is found for the disk colors of backsplash and infalling galaxies in the projected phase space. Beyond $R_{200}$, the disk colors do not change with the local galaxy density, indicating that the colors of double-component galaxies are not affected by pre-processing. A significant color-density relation is observed for single-component disk-dominated galaxies beyond $R_{200}$. We conclude that the formation of cluster S0 galaxies is primarily driven by cluster core processes acting on the disks, while evidence of pre-processing is found for single-component disk-dominated galaxies. We publicly release the data from the bulge-disk decomposition.
This is the second paper of a series aimed to study the stellar kinematics and population properties of bulges in highly-inclined barred galaxies. In this work, we carry out a detailed analysis of the stellar age, metallicity and [Mg/Fe] of 28 highly-inclined ($i > 65^{o}$) disc galaxies, from S0 to S(B)c, observed with the SAURON integral-field spectrograph. The sample is divided into two clean samples of barred and unbarred galaxies, on the basis of the correlation between the stellar velocity and h$_3$ profiles, as well as the level of cylindrical rotation within the bulge region. We find that while the mean stellar age, metallicity and [Mg/Fe] in the bulges of barred and unbarred galaxies are not statistically distinct, the [Mg/Fe] gradients along the minor axis (away from the disc) of barred galaxies are significantly different than those without bars. For barred galaxies, stars that are vertically further away from the midplane are in general more [Mg/Fe]--enhanced and thus the vertical gradients in [Mg/Fe] for barred galaxies are mostly positive, while for unbarred bulges the [Mg/Fe] profiles are typically negative or flat. This result, together with the old populations observed in the barred sample, indicates that bars are long-lasting structures, and therefore are not easily destroyed. The marked [Mg/Fe] differences with the bulges of unbarred galaxies indicate that different formation/evolution scenarios are required to explain their build-up, and emphasizes the role of bars in redistributing stellar material in the bulge dominated regions.
We have used deep, HST, near-IR imaging to study the morphological properties of the most massive galaxies at high z, modelling the WFC3/IR H-band images of the ~200 galaxies in the CANDELS-UDS field with 1 < z_phot < 3, and stellar masses M_star > 10^11 M_sun. We have used both single-Sersic and bulge+disk models, have investigated the errors/biases introduced by uncertainties in the background and the PSF, and have obtained formally-acceptable model fits to >90% of the galaxies. Our results indicate that these massive galaxies at 1 < z < 3 lie both on and below the local size-mass relation, with a median R_e~2.6 kpc, a factor of ~2.3 smaller than comparably-massive local galaxies. Moreover, we find that bulge-dominated objects in particular show evidence for a growing bimodality in the size-mass relation with increasing z, and by z > 2 the compact bulges display effective radii a factor ~4 smaller than local ellipticals of comparable mass. These trends appear to extend to the bulge components of disk-dominated galaxies, and vice versa. We also find that, while such massive galaxies at low z are bulge-dominated, at 1 < z < 2 they are predominantly mixed bulge+disk systems, and by z > 2 they are mostly disk-dominated. The majority of the disk-dominated galaxies are actively forming stars, but this is also true for many of the bulge-dominated systems. Interestingly, however, while most of the quiescent galaxies are bulge-dominated, we find that a significant fraction (25-40%) of the most quiescent galaxies have disk-dominated morphologies. Thus, while our results show that the massive galaxy population is undergoing dramatic changes at this crucial epoch, they also suggest that the physical mechanisms which quench star-formation activity are not simply connected to those responsible for the morphological transformation of massive galaxies into present-day giant ellipticals.