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Register a new userSDSS-IV MaNGA: The Spatially Resolved Stellar Initial Mass Function in $sim$400 Early-Type Galaxies
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MaNGA provides the opportunity to make precise spatially resolved measurements of the IMF slope in galaxies owing to its unique combination of spatial resolution, wavelength coverage and sample size. We derive radial gradients in age, element abundances and IMF slope analysing optical and near-infrared absorption features from stacked spectra out to the half-light radius of 366 early-type galaxies with masses $9.9 - 10.8;log M/M_{odot}$. We find flat gradients in age and [$alpha$/Fe] ratio, as well as negative gradients in metallicity, consistent with the literature. We further derive significant negative gradients in the [Na/Fe] ratio with galaxy centres being well enhanced in Na abundance by up to 0.5 dex. Finally, we find a gradient in IMF slope with a bottom-heavy IMF in the centre (typical mass excess factor of 1.5) and a Milky Way-type IMF at the half-light radius. This pattern is mass-dependent with the lowest mass galaxies in our sample featuring only a shallow gradient around a Milky Way IMF. Our results imply the local IMF-$sigma$ relation within galaxies to be even steeper than the global relation and hint towards the local metallicity being the dominating factor behind the IMF variations. We also employ different stellar population models in our analysis and show that a radial IMF gradient is found independently of the stellar population model used. A similar analysis of the Wing-Ford band provides inconsistent results and further evidence of the difficulty in measuring and modelling this particular feature.
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We study the internal gradients of stellar population properties within $1.5;R_{rm e}$ for a representative sample of 721 galaxies with stellar masses ranging between $10^{9};M_{odot}$ to $10^{11.5};M_{odot}$ from the SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU survey. Through the use of our full spectral fitting code FIREFLY, we derive light and mass-weighted stellar population properties and their radial gradients, as well as full star formation and metal enrichment histories. We also quanfify the impact that different stellar population models and full spectral fitting routines have on the derived stellar population properties, and the radial gradient measurements. In our analysis, we find that age gradients tend to be shallow for both early-type and late-type galaxies. {em Mass-weighted} age gradients of early-types are positive ($sim 0.09; {rm dex}/R_{rm e}$) pointing to outside-in progression of star formation, while late-type galaxies have negative {em light-weighted} age gradients ($sim -0.11; {rm dex}/R_{rm e}$), suggesting an inside-out formation of discs. We detect negative metallicity gradients in both early and late-type galaxies, but these are significantly steeper in late-types, suggesting that radial dependence of chemical enrichment processes and the effect of gas inflow and metal transport are far more pronounced in discs. Metallicity gradients of both morphological classes correlate with galaxy mass, with negative metallicity gradients becoming steeper with increasing galaxy mass. The correlation with mass is stronger for late-type galaxies, with a slope of $d( abla [Z/H])/d(log M)sim -0.2pm 0.05;$, compared to $d( abla [Z/H])/d(log M)sim -0.05pm 0.05;$ for early-types. This result suggests that the merger history plays a relatively small role in shaping metallicity gradients of galaxies.
Dust attenuation in star-forming spiral galaxies affects stars and gas in different ways due to local variations in dust geometry. We present spatially resolved measurements of dust attenuation for a sample of 232 such star-forming spiral galaxies, derived from spectra acquired by the SDSS-IV MaNGA survey. The dust attenuation affecting the stellar populations of these galaxies (obtained using full spectrum stellar population fitting methods) is compared with the dust attenuation in the gas (derived from the Balmer decrement). Both of these attenuation measures increase for local regions of galaxies with higher star formation rates; the dust attenuation affecting the stellar populations increases more so than the dust attenuation in the gas, causing the ratio of the dust attenuation affecting the stellar populations to the dust attenuation in the gas to decrease for local regions of galaxies with higher star formation rate densities. No systematic difference is discernible in any of these dust attenuation quantities between the spiral arm and inter-arm regions of the galaxies. While both the dust attenuation in the gas and the dust attenuation affecting the stellar populations decrease with galactocentric radius, the ratio of the two quantities does not vary with radius. This ratio does, however, decrease systematically as the stellar mass of the galaxy increases. Analysis of the radial profiles of the two dust attenuation measures suggests that there is a disproportionately high concentration of birth clouds (incorporating gas, young stars and clumpy dust) nearer to the centres of star-forming spiral galaxies.
Bars inhabit the majority of local-Universe disk galaxies and may be important drivers of galaxy evolution through the redistribution of gas and angular momentum within disks. We investigate the star formation and gas properties of bars in galaxies spanning a wide range of masses, environments, and star formation rates using the MaNGA galaxy survey. Using a robustly-defined sample of 684 barred galaxies, we find that fractional (or scaled) bar length correlates with the hosts offset from the star-formation main sequence. Considering the morphology of the H$alpha$ emission we separate barred galaxies into different categories, including barred, ringed, and central configurations, together with H$alpha$ detected at the ends of a bar. We find that only low-mass galaxies host star formation along their bars, and that this is located predominantly at the leading edge of the bar itself. Our results are supported by recent simulations of massive galaxies, which show that the position of star formation within a bar is regulated by a combination of shear forces, turbulence and gas flows. We conclude that the physical properties of a bar are mostly governed by the existing stellar mass of the host galaxy, but that they also play an important role in the galaxys ongoing star formation.
The mean stellar alpha-to-iron abundance ratio ([$alpha$/Fe]) of a galaxy is an indicator of galactic star formation timescale. It is important for understanding the star formation history of early-type galaxies (ETGs) as their star formation processes have basically stopped. Using the model templates which are made by Vazdekis et al., we apply the pPXF based spectral fitting method to estimate the [$alpha$/Fe] of 196 high signal-to-noise ratio ETGs from the MaNGA survey. The velocity dispersions within 1R$_e$ ($sigma_{e}$) range from 27 to 270 km/s. We find a flat relation between the mean [$alpha$/Fe] within the 1R$_e^{maj}$ ellipses and log($sigma_{e}$), even if limiting to the massive sample with log($sigma_{e}$/km s$^{-1}$)$>$1.9. However, the relation becomes positive after we exclude the Mg$_1$ feature in our fits, which agrees with the results from the previous work with other stellar population models, albeit with relatively large scatter. It indicates that the spectral fits with Vazdekis models could give basically the consistent predictions of [$alpha$/Fe] with previous studies when the Mg$_b$ index is used, but do not work well at the Mg$_1$ band when their $alpha$-enhanced version is employed in the metal-rich regime. We suggest avoiding this rather wide index, which covers 471AA, as it might suffer from other effects such as flux-calibration issues. For reference, we also measure the stellar population radial gradients within 1R$_e^{maj}$ ellipses. Due to the low resolution of age estimations for old objects and the Mg$_1$ issue, the uncertainties of these gradients cannot be neglected.
As hosts of living high-mass stars, Wolf-Rayet (WR) regions or WR galaxies are ideal objects for constraining the high-mass end of the stellar initial mass function (IMF). We construct a large sample of 910 WR galaxies/regions that cover a wide range of stellar metallicity, by combining three catalogs of WR galaxies/regions as previously selected from the SDSS and SDSS-IV/MaNGA surveys. We measure the equivalent width of the WR blue bump at ~4650 r{A} from each spectrum, and make comparisons with predictions of both singular population models in Starburst99 and binary population models in BPASS. We have also applied a Bayesian inference code to perform full spectral fitting to the WR spectra using the singular and binary stellar population models from BPASS as spectral templates, and we make model selection for models of different IMF slopes based on the Bayesian evidence ratios. These analyses have consistently led to a positive correlation of IMF high-mass slope $alpha$ with stellar metallicity $Z$, i.e. with steeper IMF (more bottom-heavy) at higher metallicities, and the conclusion holds even when binary population models are adopted.
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