The Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S^4G): Stellar Masses, Sizes, and Radial Profiles for 2352 nearby Galaxies

Creators: Muńoz-Mateos, Juan Carlos; Laine, Seppo

Abstract

The Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies is a volume, magnitude, and size-limited survey of 2352 nearby galaxies with deep imaging at 3.6 and 4.5 μm. In this paper, we describe our surface photometry pipeline and showcase the associated data products that we have released to the community. We also identify the physical mechanisms leading to different levels of central stellar mass concentration for galaxies with the same total stellar mass. Finally, we derive the local stellar mass–size relation at 3.6 μm for galaxies of different morphologies. Our radial profiles reach stellar mass surface densities below ~1 M⊙ pc^(-2). Given the negligible impact of dust and the almost constant mass-to-light ratio at these wavelengths, these profiles constitute an accurate inventory of the radial distribution of stellar mass in nearby galaxies. From these profiles we have also derived global properties such as asymptotic magnitudes (and the corresponding stellar masses), isophotal sizes and shapes, and concentration indices. These and other data products from our various pipelines (science-ready mosaics, object masks, 2D image decompositions, and stellar mass maps) can be publicly accessed at IRSA (http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/SPITZER/S4G/).

Additional Information

© 2015 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 June 11; accepted 2015 May 12; published 2015 July 1. The authors are grateful to the entire S4G team for their collective effort in this project. We also thank the staff at IRSA, and in particular Justin Howell, for implementing the online access to our data. We acknowledge useful suggestions from an anonymous referee, which helped to improve the scientific content of this paper. We thank Rebecca Lange for sharing the contour data of the GAMA mass–size relation. J.C.M.M. acknowledges the receipt of an ESO Fellowship. This work was also co-funded by NASA JPL/Spitzer grant RSA 1374189 provided for the S4G project. J.C.M.M., K.S., and T.K. also acknowledge support from the NRAO. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. We also acknowledge financial support from the DAGAL network from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ under REA grant agreement number PITN-GA-2011-289313. E.A. and A.B. also acknowledge financial support from the CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales—France). J.H.K. and A.G. d.P. acknowledge financial support from the Spanish MINECO under grants number AYA2013-41243-P and AYA2012- 30717, respectively. This work is based on data acquired with the Spitzer Space Telescope, and makes extensive use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), both of which are operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We have also made use of the HyperLeda database (http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr) and NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. Facilities: Spitzer

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Submitted - 1505.03534v1.pdf

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