No Arabic abstract
We explore how the slopes and scatters of the scaling relations of disk galaxies (Vm-L[-M], R-L[-M], and Vm-R) do change when moving from B to K bands and to stellar and baryonic quantities. For our compiled sample of 76 normal, non-interacting high and low surface brightness galaxies, we find some changes, which evidence evolution effects, mainly related to gas infall and star formation (SF). We also explore correlations among the (B-K) color, stellar mass fraction fs, mass M (luminosity L), and surface density (SB), as well as correlations among the residuals of the scaling relations. Some of our findings are: (i) the scale length Rb is a third parameter in the baryonic TF relation and the residuals of this relation follow a trend (slope ~-0.15) with the residuals of the Rb-Mb relation; for the stellar and K band cases, R is not anymore a third parameter and the mentioned trend disappears; (ii) among the TFRs, the B-band TFR is the most scattered; in this case, the color is a third parameter; (iii) the LSB galaxies break some observed trends, which suggest a threshold in the gas surface density Sg, below which the SF becomes independent of the gas infall rate and Sg. Our results are interpreted and discussed in the light of LCDM-based models of galaxy evolution. The models explain not only the baryonic scaling relations, but also most of the processes responsible for the observed changes in the slopes, scatters, and correlations among the residuals when changing to stellar and luminous quantities. The baryon fraction is required to be smaller than 0.05 on average. We detect some potential difficulties for the models: the observed color-M and surface density-M correlations are steeper, and the intrinsic scatter in the baryonic TFR is smaller than those predicted. [abridged]
We build templates of rotation curves as a function of the $I-$band luminosity via the mass modeling (by the sum of a thin exponential disk and a cored halo profile) of suitably normalized, stacked data from wide samples of local spiral galaxies. We then exploit such templates to determine fundamental stellar and halo properties for a sample of about $550$ local disk-dominated galaxies with high-quality measurements of the optical radius $R_{rm opt}$ and of the corresponding rotation velocity $V_{rm opt}$. Specifically, we determine the stellar $M_star$ and halo $M_{rm H}$ masses, the halo size $R_{rm H}$ and velocity scale ${V_{rm H}}$, and the specific angular momenta of the stellar $j_star$ and dark matter $j_{rm H}$ components. We derive global scaling relationships involving such stellar and halo properties both for the individual galaxies in our sample and for their mean within bins; the latter are found to be in pleasing agreement with previous determinations by independent methods (e.g., abundance matching techniques, weak lensing observations, and individual rotation curve modeling). Remarkably, the size of our sample and the robustness of our statistical approach allow us to attain an unprecedented level of precision over an extended range of mass and velocity scales, with $1sigma$ dispersion around the mean relationships of less than $0.1$ dex. We thus set new standard local relationships that must be reproduced by detailed physical models, that offer a basis for improving the sub-grid recipes in numerical simulations, that provide a benchmark to gauge independent observations and check for systematics, and that constitute a basic step toward the future exploitation of the spiral galaxy population as a cosmological probe.
We investigate the correlations among stellar mass (M_*), disk scale length (R_d), and rotation velocity at 2.2 disk scale lengths (V_2.2) for a sample of 81 disk-dominated galaxies (disk/total >= 0.9) selected from the SDSS. We measure V_2.2 from long-slit H-alpha rotation curves and infer M_* from galaxy i-band luminosities (L_i) and g-r colors. We find logarithmic slopes of 2.60+/-0.13 and 3.05+/-0.12 for the L_i-V_2.2 and M_*-V_2.2 relations, somewhat shallower than most previous studies, with intrinsic scatter of 0.13 dex and 0.16 dex. Our direct estimates of the total-to-stellar mass ratio within 2.2R_d, assuming a Kroupa IMF, yield a median ratio of 2.4 for M_*>10^10 Msun and 4.4 for M_*=10^9-10^10 Msun, with large scatter at a given M_* and R_d. The typical ratio of the rotation speed predicted for the stellar disk alone to the observed rotation speed at 2.2R_d is ~0.65. The distribution of R_d at fixed M_* is broad, but we find no correlation between disk size and the residual from the M_*-V_2.2 relation, implying that this relation is an approximately edge-on view of the disk galaxy fundamental plane. Independent of the assumed IMF, this result implies that stellar disks do not, on average, dominate the mass within 2.2R_d. We discuss our results in the context of infall models of disk formation in cold dark matter halos. A model with a disk-to-halo mass ratio m_d=0.05 provides a reasonable match to the R_d-M_* distribution for spin parameters lambda ranging from ~0.04-0.08, and it yields a reasonable match to the mean M_*-V_2.2 relation. A model with m_d=0.1 predicts overly strong correlations between disk size and M_*-V_2.2 residual. Explaining the wide range of halo-to-disk mass ratios within 2.2R_d requires significant scatter in m_d values, with systematically lower m_d for galaxies with lower $M_*$.
The scaling relations between rotation velocity, size and luminosity form a benchmark test for any theory of disk galaxy formation. We confront recent theoretical models of disk formation to a recent large compilation of such scaling relations. We stress the importance of achieving a fair comparison between models and observations.
We construct a large data set of global structural parameters for 1300 field and cluster spiral galaxies and explore the joint distribution of luminosity L, optical rotation velocity V, and disk size R at I- and 2MASS K-bands. The I- and K-band velocity-luminosity (VL) relations have log-slopes of 0.29 and 0.27, respectively with sigma_ln(VL)~0.13, and show a small dependence on color and morphological type in the sense that redder, early-type disk galaxies rotate faster than bluer, later-type disk galaxies for most luminosities. The VL relation at I- and K-bands is independent of surface brightness, size and light concentration. The log-slope of the I- and K-band RL relations is a strong function of morphology and varies from 0.25 to 0.5. The average dispersion sigma_ln(RL) decreases from 0.33 at I-band to 0.29 at K, likely due to the 2MASS selection bias against lower surface brightness galaxies. Measurement uncertainties are sigma_ln(V)~0.09, sigma_ln(L)~0.14 and somewhat larger and harder to estimate for ln(R). The color dependence of the VL relation is consistent with expectations from stellar population synthesis models. The VL and RL residuals are largely uncorrelated with each other; the RV-RL residuals show only a weak positive correlation. These correlations suggest that scatter in luminosity is not a significant source of the scatter in the VL and RL relations. The observed scaling relations can be understood in the context of a model of disk galaxies embedded in dark matter halos that invokes low mean spin parameters and dark halo expansion, as we describe in our companion paper (Dutton et al. 2007). We discuss in two appendices various pitfalls of standard analytical derivations of galaxy scaling relations, including the Tully-Fisher relation with different slopes. (Abridged).
It has been recently found that the characteristic photometric parameters of antitruncated discs in S0 galaxies follow tight scaling relations. We investigate if similar scaling relations are satisfied by galaxies of other morphological types. We have analysed the trends in several photometric planes relating the characteristic surface brightness and scalelengths of the breaks and the inner and outer discs of local antitruncated S0-Scd galaxies, using published data and fits performed to the surface brightness profiles of two samples of Type-III galaxies in the R and Spitzer 3.6 microns bands. We have performed linear fits to the correlations followed by different galaxy types in each plane, as well as several statistical tests to determine their significance. We have found that: 1) the antitruncated discs of all galaxy types from Sa to Scd obey tight scaling relations both in R and 3.6 microns, as observed in S0s; 2) the majority of these correlations are significant accounting for the numbers of the available data samples; 3) the trends are clearly linear when the characteristic scalelengths are plotted on a logarithmic scale; and 4) the correlations relating the characteristic surface brightnesses of the inner and outer discs and the breaks with the various characteristic scalelengths significantly improve when the latter are normalized to the optical radius of the galaxy. The results suggest that the scaling relations of Type-III discs are independent of the morphological type and the presence (or absence) of bars within the observational uncertainties of the available datasets, although larger and deeper samples are required to confirm this. The tight structural coupling implied by these scaling relations impose strong constraints on the mechanisms proposed for explaining the formation of antitruncated stellar discs in the galaxies across the whole Hubble Sequence (Abridged).