Planetary nebulae and the dynamics of early-type galaxies

Physics

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Scientific paper

We use Planetary Nebulae (PNe) as tracers to study the mass distribution of early-type galaxies. As remants of intermediate mass stars we expect PNe to follow the stellar light distribution and to be numerous enough to be an effective tracer. PNe radiate hundreds of solar luminosities in a few emission lines (mostly [OIII] 5007λ), making it possible to detect them over extragalactic distances, and measure their radial velocities. We report on observations of four early-type galaxies performed with the Rutgers Fabry-Perot. We explain our data reduction and candidate selection procedure, showing how strongly the statistical procedure can influence the limiting magnitude of our survey. We find 54 PNe in NGC 3384, 50 in NGC 3379, 6 in NGC 1549 and 2 in NGC 4636. Our typical limiting magnitude is m5007 = 26.1. We constructed simple mass models for the two galaxies with a sufficiently large PN sample, the Leo galaxies NGC 3379 and NGC 3384. Using a novel Monte Carlo Markov Chain method we explore the space of likely mass models. Our spherical model for the E1 galaxy NGC 3379 shows that mass follows light within five half-light radii with an overall B band mass-to-light ratio ˜5. Our model for the SBO galaxy NGC 3384 is not physically plausible, although it does seem to indicate that in the disk mass follows light as well, with a B band mass-to-light ratio ˜6.

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