Measuring bulge and disk surface brightness in disk galaxies

Méndez-Abreu, Jairo; Corsini, E. M.; Aguerri, J. A. L.
Bibliographical reference

"Proceedings of "Baryons in Dark Matter Halos". Novigrad, Croatia, 5-9 Oct 2004. Editors: R. Dettmar, U. Klein, P. Salucci. Published by SISSA, Proceedings of Science, http://pos.sissa.it, p.83.1"

Advertised on:
12
2004
Number of authors
3
IAC number of authors
0
Citations
1
Refereed citations
0
Description
The analysis of the light distribution of galaxy is a crucial step in studying their structural components and therefore it plays a key role in understanding the processes that led to galaxy formation and evolution. For example, this allows to investigate the 3D shape of bulges and disks or when combined with kinematic data to derive the mass distribution of the luminous matter of galaxies in order to constrain their dark matter content. Conventional bulge-disk photometric decompositions based on elliptically averaged surface brightness profiles are subject to strong systematic errors due to the different intrinsic shapes of bulge and disk and to the viewing angle of the galaxy (e.g., [1]). Several 2D decomposition techniques have been developed in the last years (e.g., [2], [3]). Here we present an automatic and 2D parametric photometric decomposition to derive the pa- rameters of the structural components of disk galaxies. It differs from the previous ones for the choice of guess parameters, seeing convolution, and allowing free position angles for bulge and disk. The fitting algorithm adopts a Sérsic and exponential model for the bulge and disk component, respectively. Our aim is to apply our code for photometric decomposition to study high and low surface-brightness galaxies.