Massive compact galaxies in the local Universe: what are they?

Details Massive compact galaxies in the local Universe: what are they? Massive compact galaxies in the local Universe: what are they?

Nov 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011hsa6.conf..186f&link_type=abstract

Highlights of Spanish Astrophysics VI, Proceedings of the IX Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA), held

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

Recent investigations have provided evidences that many massive (M_* > 10^{11} M_&sun;) spheroid galaxies in the early universe (z ≥ 1.5) were extremely compact (r_e ˜ 1 kpc). According to some galaxy formation theories, a fraction of these massive galaxies in the local Universe would represent surviving relics of the high-z massive galaxies. We present a detailed study of the kinematics and the stellar populations for seven local compact galaxiesfor which we obtained high-quality long-slit spectra. We find that thesegalaxies show metallicity values around solar. However, unlike common, average-sized localellipticals of similar velocity dispersion, they show young (<2 Gyr) meanluminosity weighted ages as well as a clearly different abundance ratio pattern.In addition, almost all these massive compact local galaxies show strong rotation curves.The stellar population findings point that these local objects cannot be the relics ofhigh-z compact ellipticals. The most stricking result we have found is that our fullspectrum-fitting analysis shows that the stellar populations of our galaxies are mainly contributed by young populations.

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