Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21112603w&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #126.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.956
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Mergers between red galaxies are observed to be common in the nearby Universe, but the nature of their colors is not yet well determined; the red colors could be due to either older stellar populations in early-type galaxies and/or dust associated with (obscured) star formation. Ground-based images lack the required resolution to distinguish between these two hypotheses, but the problem is resolved with HST. We present HST/ACS
and WFPC2 observations of a sample of 31 E/S0 red-sequence galaxies at z 0.1, containing undisturbed galaxies, merger remnants, and ongoing mergers. Nearly all galaxies have early-type morphologies and are well-fit by r1/4 law profiles. The amount of cold gas is calculated from the mean color-excess, assuming a simple relation between gas mass and dust mass. We find that 90% of the galaxies exhibit no visible dust signatures, while 10% have detectable dust. The gas-to-stellar mass ratio is low for all galaxies, including the three with detected dust, where Mgas/Mstellar < 0.001. We infer that red mergers in the nearby Universe involve mostly early-type galaxies containing very little cold gas and dust.
van Dokkum Pieter G.
Whitaker Katherine E.
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