Probing the stellar populations in the outskirts of spiral galaxies

Bakos, Judit; Trujillo, Ignacio; Pohlen, Michael
Referencia bibliográfica

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Volume 218, Issue 1, pp. 012015 (2010).

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3
2010
Número de autores
3
Número de autores del IAC
0
Número de citas
0
Número de citas referidas
0
Descripción
We present our results on the stellar population properties of the outskirts of disk galaxies. In particular, we focus on spiral galaxies with stellar disk truncations in their radial surface brightness profiles. Using SDSS data we show color gradients. We find that the color radial profile exhibits a "U'-shape", showing a minimum at the position of the break of the surface brightness profile. We obtain stellar surface mass density profiles of truncated galaxies as well, these show a peculiar behaviour: they follow very closely an exponential decrement. This suggests the idea that the observed properties of truncated galaxies are not caused by a drop in the mass distribution but by a different stellar population in the outer regions of the disks. Confronting this with current theoretical scenarios we find that this is likely to be a result of secular evolution, in which scenario stars are being formed inside the break and then being motioned outwards which would result in an inverted age gradient corresponding to the observed color profiles. Having maintained this idea, using multiwave-length data from GALEX, SDSS, UKIDSS and SPITZER we showed a dependence of the inner-outer scale-length ratio of truncated disks. Our results suggest that there is an existing general trend of the scale-length ratio: from bluer to redder bands the scale-length ratio decreases, which is in accordance with the stellar disk being dominated by an older stellar population in the outer disk.