The Thick Disk in the Galaxy NGC 4244 from S^4G Imaging
- Creators
- Comerón, Sébastien
- Knapen, Johan H.
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Sheth, Kartik
- Regan, Michael W.
- Hinz, Joannah L.
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Gil de Paz, Armando
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Menéndez-Delmestre, Karín
- Muñoz-Mateos, Juan-Carlos
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Seibert, Mark
- Kim, Taehyun
- Athanassoula, E.
- Bosma, Albert
- Buta, Ronald J.
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Elmegreen, Bruce G.
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Ho, Luis C.
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Holwerda, Benne W.
- Laurikainen, Eija
- Salo, Heikki
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Schinnerer, Eva
Abstract
If thick disks are ubiquitous and a natural product of disk galaxy formation and/or evolution processes, all undisturbed galaxies that have evolved during a significant fraction of a Hubble time should have a thick disk. The late-type spiral galaxy NGC 4244 has been reported as the only nearby edge-on galaxy without a confirmed thick disk. Using data from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S^4G) we have identified signs of two disk components in this galaxy. The asymmetries between the light profiles on both sides of the mid-plane of NGC 4244 can be explained by a combination of the galaxy not being perfectly edge-on and a certain degree of opacity of the thin disk. We argue that the subtlety of the thick disk is a consequence of either a limited secular evolution in NGC 4244, a small fraction of stellar material in the fragments which built the galaxy, or a high amount of gaseous accretion after the formation of the galaxy.
Additional Information
© 2011 American Astronomical Society. Received 2010 August 16; accepted 2010 November 29; published 2011 February 7. The authors thank the entire S4G team for their efforts in this project. We thank our anonymous referee for giving useful advice which improved the quality of this paper. We thank Inma Martínez-Valpuesta for her useful comments. 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. We also gratefully acknowledge support from NASA JPL/Spitzer grant RSA 1374189 provided for the S⁴G project. K.M.D. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-0802399. E.A. and A.B. thank the Centre National d'Études Spatiales for financial support.Attached Files
Published - Comeron2011p13011Astrophys_J.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 22892
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110315-092515860
- RSA 1374189
- NASA
- AST-0802399
- NSF
- Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES)
- Created
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2011-03-15Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)