The Two Tilts of the Fundamental Plane

Details The Two Tilts of the Fundamental Plane The Two Tilts of the Fundamental Plane

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21332901g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #329.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.385

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

If dynamical mass-to-light ratios (Mdyn/L) were uniform for all early type galaxies, the Fundamental Plane would be infinitely thin and would correspond exactly to the Virial Plane. The tilt of the FP indicates that Mdyn/L varies systematically along the plane, while the finite thickness of the FP demonstrates that a range of Mdyn/L exists at a fixed point on the FP. As part of my thesis work, I have mapped the stellar population parameters of early type galaxies in 3-D Fundamental Plane space. This makes it possible to determine the amount that stellar population variations contribute to both the tilt and the thickness of the FP. We find that the stellar population variations contribute at most 50% of the total thickness of the FP and that correlated variations in the IMF or in the central dark matter fraction must make up the rest. Mapping stellar M/L along the midplane of the FP, we explicitly decompose the FP tilt into two components: one due to stellar population effects and one due to varying IMF or dark matter fraction. These two tilts rotate the FP around different axes in 3-D FP space, indicating that a simple parameterization of the total FP tilt as a function of a single parameter (such as luminosity) is inadequate to describe the 3-D behavior of the FP.

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