A unified picture of breaks and truncations in spiral galaxies from SDSS and S^4G imaging

Creators: Martín-Navarro, Ignacio; Mizusawa, Trisha; Sheth, Kartik

Abstract

The mechanism causing breaks in the radial surface-brightness distribution of spiral galaxies is not yet well known. Despite theoretical efforts, there is not a unique explanation for these features and the observational results are not conclusive. In an attempt to address this problem, we have selected a sample of 34 highly inclined spiral galaxies present in both the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S^4G). We have measured the surface-brightness profiles in the five Sloan optical bands and in the 3.6-μm Spitzer band. We have also calculated the colour and stellar surface mass density profiles using the available photometric information, finding two differentiated features: an innermost break radius at distances of ∼8 ± 1 kpc [0.77 ± 0.06 R_(25)] and a second characteristic radius, or truncation radius, close to the outermost optical extent (∼14 ± 2 kpc [1.09 ± 0.05 R_(25)]) of the galaxy. We propose in this work that breaks might be phenomena related to a threshold in the star formation, while truncations are more likely a real drop in the stellar mass density of the disc associated with the maximum angular momentum of the stars.

Additional Information

© 2012 The Authors. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2012 RAS. Accepted 2012 August 14. Received 2012 August 8; in original form 2012 June 8. Article first published online: 5 Nov 2012. We thank Alexandre Vazdekis and Jesús Falcόn-Barroso for their useful comments. We especially thank the referee, Professor Piet van der Kruit, for providing very constructive and precise comments on this article. This work has been supported by the Programa Nacional de Astronomía y Astrofísica of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant AYA2010-21322-C03-02. We acknowledge financial support from 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. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III web site is http://www.sdss3.org/. SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington and Yale University. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. We acknowledge the usage of the HyperLeda data base and the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Data base (NED), operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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