Bibcode
DOI
Vazdekis, A.; Peletier, R. F.; Beckman, J. E.; Casuso, E.
Bibliographical reference
Astrophysical Journal Supplement v.111, p.203
Advertised on:
7
1997
Citations
186
Refereed citations
169
Description
We present the results of applying a new chemo-evolutionary stellar
population model, developed in a previous paper, to new high-quality
observational data of the nuclear regions of two representative
elliptical galaxies and the bulge of the Sombrero galaxy. Here we fit in
detail ~20 absorption lines and six optical and near-infrared colors,
following two approaches: fitting a single-age, single-metallicity model
and fitting our full chemical evolutionary model. We find that all the
iron lines are weaker than the best-fitting models predict, indicating
that the iron abundance is anomalous and deficient. We also find that
the Ca I index at 4227 A is much lower than predicted by the models. We
can obtain good fits for all the other lines and observed colors with
models of old and metal-rich stellar populations and can show that the
observed radial gradients are due to metallicity decreasing outward. We
find that good fits are obtained both with fully evolutionary models and
with single-age, single-metallicity models. This is due to the fact that
in the evolutionary model more than 80% of the stars form within 1.5 Gyr
after the formation of the galaxies. The fact that slightly better fits
are obtained with evolutionary models indicates that these galaxies
contain a small spread in metallicity.