Investigating the Merger Origin of Early-type Galaxies using Ultra-deep Optical Images
Pierre-Alain Duc
(1)
,
Jean-Charles Cuillandre
(2)
,
Katherine Alatalo
(3)
,
Leo Blitz
(3)
,
Maxime Bois
(4)
,
Frédéric Bournaud
(1)
,
M. Bureau
(5)
,
Michele Cappellari
(5)
,
Patrick Côté
(6)
,
Rebecca L. Davies
(5)
,
Timothy A. Davis
(5)
,
P. T. de Zeeuw
(7)
,
Eric Emsellem
(7, 4)
,
Laura Ferrarese
(6)
,
Etienne Ferriere
(1)
,
Stephen D. J. Gwyn
(6)
,
Sadegh Khochfar
(8)
,
Davor Krajnovic
(7)
,
Harald Kuntschner
(7)
,
Pierre-Yves Lablanche
(4)
,
Lauren A. Macarthur
(6)
,
Richard M. Mcdermid
(9)
,
Leo Michel-Dansac
(4)
,
Raffaella Morganti
(10)
,
Thorsten Naab
(11)
,
Tom A. Oosterloo
(10)
,
Marc Sarzi
(12)
,
Nicholas Scott
(5)
,
Paolo Serra
(10)
,
Anne-Marie Weijmans
(13)
,
Lisa M. Young
(14)
1
CEA -
Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives
2 CFHT - Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation
3 UCBerkeley - University of California
4 Observatoire de Lyon
5 University of Oxford
6 NRC - National Research Council of Canada
7 ESO, Garching, Germany
8 MPE, Garching, Germany
9 Gemini Observatory
10 ASTRON - Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
11 MPI - Max Planck Institute
12 UH - University of Hertfordshire [Hatfield]
13 Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics [Toronto]
14 New Mexico Tech
2 CFHT - Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Corporation
3 UCBerkeley - University of California
4 Observatoire de Lyon
5 University of Oxford
6 NRC - National Research Council of Canada
7 ESO, Garching, Germany
8 MPE, Garching, Germany
9 Gemini Observatory
10 ASTRON - Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
11 MPI - Max Planck Institute
12 UH - University of Hertfordshire [Hatfield]
13 Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics [Toronto]
14 New Mexico Tech
Pierre-Alain Duc
- Fonction : Auteur
- PersonId : 179615
- IdHAL : pierre-alain-duc
- ORCID : 0000-0003-3343-6284
- IdRef : 081788339
Résumé
The mass assembly of galaxies leaves various imprints on their surroundings, such as shells, streams and tidal tails. The frequency and properties of these fine structures depend on the mechanism driving the mass assembly: e.g. a monolithic collapse, rapid cold-gas accretion followed by violent disk instabilities, minor mergers or major dry/wet mergers. Therefore, by studying the outskirts of galaxies, one can learn about their main formation mechanism. I present here our on-going work to characterize the outskirts of Early-Type Galaxies (ETGs), which are powerful probes at low redshift of the hierarchical mass assembly of galaxies. This work relies on ultra-deep optical images obtained at CFHT with the wide-field of view MegaCam camera of field and cluster ETGs obtained as part of the ATLAS3D and NGVS projects. State of the art numerical simulations are used to interpret the data. The images reveal a wealth of unknown faint structures at levels as faint as 29 mag arcsec-2 in the g-band. Initial results for two galaxies are presented here.