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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/230515
- Title
- On the shapes and structures of high-redshift compact galaxies
- Author(s)
- Chevance, Melanie; Weijmans, Anne-Marie; Damjanov, Ivana; Abraham, Roberto G.; Simard, Luc; van den Bergh, Sidney; Caris, Evelyn; Glazebrook, Karl
- Abstract
- Recent deep Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 imaging suggests that a majority of compact quiescent massive galaxies at z ~ 2 may contain disks. To investigate this claim, we have compared the ellipticity distribution of 31 carefully selected high-redshift massive quiescent compact galaxies to a set of mass-selected ellipticity and Sérsic index distributions obtained from two-dimensional structural fits to ~40, 000 nearby galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test shows that the distribution of ellipticities for the high-redshift galaxies is consistent with the ellipticity distribution of a similarly chosen sample of massive early-type galaxies. However, the distribution of Sérsic indices for the high-redshift sample is inconsistent with that of local early-type galaxies, and instead resembles that of local disk-dominated populations. The mismatch between the properties of high-redshift compact galaxies and those of both local early-type and disk-dominated systems leads us to conclude that the basic structures of high-redshift compact galaxies probably do not closely resemble those of any single local galaxy population. Any galaxy population analog to the high-redshift compact galaxies that exists at the current epoch is either a mix of different types of galaxies, or possibly a unique class of objects on their own.
- Publication type
- Journal article
- Research centre
- Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies. Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
- Source
- Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 754, no. 2 (Aug 2012), article no. L24
- Publication year
- 2012
- FOR Code(s)
- 0201 Astronomical and Space Sciences
- Keyword(s)
- Compact galaxies; Fundamental parameters; Galaxy evolution; Galaxy formation; Galaxy structure; High-redshift galaxies; Statistics
- Publisher
- Institute of Physics Publishing
- ISSN
- 2041-8205
- Publisher URL
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/754/2/l24
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2012 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. The American Astronomical Society does not allow Swinburne Research Bank to archive either the accepted manuscript or the published version of the article. However you can find an earlier version of the full text here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3579
- Peer reviewed
