Metallicity and age of the Stellar Stream Around the Disk Galaxy NGC 5907
Abstract
Stellar streams have become central to studies of the interaction histories of nearby galaxies. To characterize the most prominent parts of the stellar stream around the well-known nearby (d = 17 Mpc) edge-on disk galaxy NGC 5907, we have obtained and analyzed new, deep gri Subaru/Suprime-Cam and 3.6 μm Spitzer/Infrared Array Camera observations. Combining the near-infrared 3.6 μm data with visible-light images allows us to use a long wavelength baseline to estimate the metallicity and age of the stellar population along an ~60 kpc long segment of the stream. We have fitted the stellar spectral energy distribution with a single-burst stellar population synthesis model and we use it to distinguish between the proposed satellite accretion and minor/major merger formation models of the stellar stream around this galaxy. We conclude that a massive minor merger (stellar mass ratio of at least 1:8) can best account for the metallicity of −0.3 inferred along the brightest parts of the stream.
Additional Information
© 2016 American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 February 22; revised 2016 June 15; accepted 2016 June 23; published 2016 September 6. We thank the referee, Rodrigo Ibata, for critical comments that greatly improved the paper. We are indebted to David Shupe for help with fitting the stellar population synthesis models. We thank Charlie Conroy, Ben Johnson and Alexa Villaume for helpful discussions regarding stellar population synthesis codes. We thank Ben Johnson for his help with the Python interface to FSPS. We thank Sean Carey for useful discussions on error estimation. And we thank Evan Kirby and Anna Gallazzi for permission to reproduce a figure from their paper. D.M.D. was supported by Sonderforschungsbereich SFB 881 "The Milky Way System" (subproject A2) of the German Research Foundation (DFG). This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant Nos. AST-1211995 and AST-1518294. This work is based in part 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. Based in part on data collected at Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Facilities: Spitzer - Spitzer Space Telescope satellite, Subaru (Suprime-Cam) - . Software: MOPEX, SExtractor, Adobe Photoshop.Attached Files
Published - aj_152_3_72.pdf
Submitted - 1607.03554v1.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 70172
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20160906-101603922
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- AST-1211995
- NSF
- AST-1518294
- NSF
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
-
2016-09-06Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-11Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)