Bibcode
Comerón, S.; Salo, H.; Knapen, J. H.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 610, id.A5, 169 pp.
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2
2018
Journal
Citations
52
Refereed citations
48
Description
Recent studies have made the community aware of the importance of
accounting for scattered light when examining low-surface-brightness
galaxy features such as thick discs. In our past studies of the thick
discs of edge-on galaxies in the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in
Galaxies - the S4G - we modelled the point spread function as
a Gaussian. In this paper we re-examine our results using a revised
point spread function model that accounts for extended wings out to more
than 2\farcm5. We study the 3.6 μm images of 141 edge-on galaxies
from the S4G and its early-type galaxy extension. Thus, we
more than double the samples examined in our past studies. We decompose
the surface-brightness profiles of the galaxies perpendicular to their
mid-planes assuming that discs are made of two stellar discs in
hydrostatic equilibrium. We decompose the axial surface-brightness
profiles of galaxies to model the central mass concentration - described
by a Sérsic function - and the disc - described by a broken
exponential disc seen edge-on. Our improved treatment fully confirms the
ubiquitous occurrence of thick discs. The main difference between our
current fits and those presented in our previous papers is that now the
scattered light from the thin disc dominates the surface brightness at
levels below μ 26 mag arcsec-2. We stress that those
extended thin disc tails are not physical, but pure scattered light.
This change, however, does not drastically affect any of our previously
presented results: 1) Thick discs are nearly ubiquitous. They are not an
artefact caused by scattered light as has been suggested elsewhere. 2)
Thick discs have masses comparable to those of thin discs in low-mass
galaxies - with circular velocities vc< 120 km
s-1 - whereas they are typically less massive than the thin
discs in high-mass galaxies. 3) Thick discs and central mass
concentrations seem to have formed at the same epoch from a common
material reservoir. 4) Approximately 50% of the up-bending breaks in
face-on galaxies are caused by the superposition of a thin and a thick
disc where the scale-length of the latter is the largest.
Data of Figs. B.1 and C.1 are only available at the CDS via anonymous
ftp to http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (http://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/610/A5
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