Spitzer/Infrared Array Camera near-infrared features in the outer parts of S^4G galaxies
- Creators
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Laine, Seppo
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Sheth, Kartik
Abstract
We present a catalogue and images of visually detected features, such as asymmetries, extensions, warps, shells, tidal tails, polar rings, and obvious signs of mergers or interactions, in the faint outer regions (at and outside of R_(25)) of nearby galaxies. This catalogue can be used in future quantitative studies that examine galaxy evolution due to internal and external factors. We are able to reliably detect outer region features down to a brightness level of 0.03 MJy sr^(−1) pixel^(−1) at 3.6 μm in the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S^4G). We also tabulate companion galaxies. We find asymmetries in the outer isophotes in 22 ± 1 per cent of the sample. The asymmetry fraction does not correlate with galaxy classification as an interacting galaxy or merger remnant, or with the presence of companions. We also compare the detected features to similar features in galaxies taken from cosmological zoom re-simulations. The simulated images have a higher fraction (33 per cent) of outer disc asymmetries, which may be due to selection effects and an uncertain star formation threshold in the models. The asymmetries may have either an internal (e.g. lopsidedness due to dark halo asymmetry) or external origin.
Additional Information
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 August 11. Received 2014 August 6; in original form 2014 May 13. First published online September 15, 2014. We thank Ramin Skibba for helpful comments on a draft of this paper. We also thank Carrie Bridge for discussions on the merger rate. We acknowledge the helpful discussion with Chris Lintott about biases in classification. We acknowledge financial support to the DAGAL network from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ under REA grant agreement number PITN-GA-2011-289313. This work was cofunded under the Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission (FP7-COFUND). We also gratefully acknowledge support from NASA JPL/Spitzer grant RSA 1374189 provided for the S4G project. EA and AB thank the CNES for support. KS, J-C M-M, TK, and TM acknowledge support from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The authors thank the entire S4G team for their efforts in this project. This work is based on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope,which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. Support for this work was provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech. We are grateful to the dedicated staff at the Spitzer Science Center for their help and support in planning and execution of this Exploration Science program. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by JPL, Caltech, under contract with NASA.Attached Files
Published - MNRAS-2014-Laine-3015-39.pdf
Supplemental Material - figures1.pdf
Supplemental Material - figures2.pdf
Files
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 52090
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20141124-093705285
- PITN-GA-2011-289313
- Marie Curie Fellowship
- RSA 1374189
- NASA
- Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES)
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory
- NSF
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
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2014-11-24Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)