The Ancient Star Forming Disk of NGC 404

Details The Ancient Star Forming Disk of NGC 404 The Ancient Star Forming Disk of NGC 404

May 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21630704w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #216, #307.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.868

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We present HST/WFPC2 resolved stellar photometry across the disk of the nearby dwarf S0 galaxy NGC 404, which hosts an extended gas disk. The locations of our fields contain a roughly equal mixture of bulge and disk stars. Detailed modeling of the color-magnitude diagrams suggests that 70% of the stellar mass in the NGC 404 disk formed by z 2 (10 Gyr ago) and at least 90% formed prior to z 1 (8 Gyr ago). These results indicate that the stellar populations of the NGC 404 disk are on average significantly older than those of other nearby disk galaxies, suggesting that early and late type disks may have different long-term evolutionary histories, not simply differences in their current and recent star formation rates. Comparisons of the spatial distribution of the young stellar mass and FUV emission in GALEX images show that the brightest FUV regions contain the youngest stellar mass, but some young stars (<160 Myr) lie outside of these regions. Finally, we use our measurements to infer the relationship between the star formation rate and the gas density of the disk at previous epochs. We find that most of the history of the NGC 404 disk is consistent with star formation that has decreased with the gas density according to the Schmidt law. However, 0.5-1 Gyr ago, the star formation rate was unusually low for the inferred gas density, consistent with the possibility that there was a gas accretion event that reignited star formation 0.5 Gyr ago. Such an event could explain why this dwarf S0 galaxy hosts an extended gas disk.
Support for this work was provided by NASA through grants GO-10915 and GO-11719 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555.

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