Galaxies in Different Environments: From Groups to Clusters
MUSEings on the Stellar Population and IMF of the Fornax cluster's biggest early type galaxy
Date Submitted
2017-04-14 10:40:34
Sam Vaughan
Roger Davies, Simon Zieleniewski, Ryan Houghton
University of Oxford
We present a spatially resolved study of the stellar population, chemical abundances and Initial Mass Function (IMF) of NGC 1399, the largest early type galaxy (ETG) in the Fornax cluster. Using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), we obtain hundreds of very high signal to noise spectra of the central 5 kpc of NGC 1399, with a spatial resolution of less than a hundred parsecs in the very centre. We use state of the art stellar population synthesis models, combined with a bayesian full spectral fitting approach, to make radial measurements of quantities such as age, metallicity and individual elemental abundances, as well as the IMF.
The IMF is of fundamental importance for understanding the stellar content of galaxies, since it sets the importance of stellar feedback in a system and determines the amount of chemical re-enrichment a galaxy experiences. It is in the very centre of massive ETGs similar to NGC 1399 that evidence has recently been found for variations in the stellar IMF (e.g. van Dokkum et al. 2016; Conroy et al. 2017; La Barbera et. al 2016), although not all studies agree (e.g. McConnell et al. 2016; Zieleniewski et al. 2017). We discuss our findings in NGC 1399 in light of these recent contradictory results, as well as, more generally, how the IMF may be influenced by the environment a galaxy resides in.
Schedule
id
Thursday
date time
13:30 - 15:00
14:45
Abstract
MUSEings on the Stellar Population and IMF of the Fornax cluster's biggest early type galaxy