ON THE SHAPES AND STRUCTURES OF HIGH-REDSHIFT COMPACT GALAXIES

Journal Article · Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2012 · Astrophysical Journal Letters

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/754/2/L24· OSTI ID:22047647

Chevance, Melanie; Damjanov, Ivana; Abraham, Roberto G ^[1]; Weijmans, Anne-Marie ^[2]; Simard, Luc; Van den Bergh, Sidney ^[3]; Caris, Evelyn; Glazebrook, Karl ^[4]

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1. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 50 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3H4 (Canada)
2. Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 50 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3H4 (Canada)
3. Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, National Research Council of Canada, 5071 West Saanich Road, Victoria, BC V9E 2E7 (Canada)
4. Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University, Hawthorn, VIC 3122 (Australia)

Recent deep Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 imaging suggests that a majority of compact quiescent massive galaxies at z {approx} 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 Sersic index distributions obtained from two-dimensional structural fits to {approx}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 Sersic 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.

• OSTI ID: 22047647
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 754, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 2041-8205
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
ASTRONOMY
ASTROPHYSICS
GALACTIC EVOLUTION
GALAXIES
INDEXES
MASS
RED SHIFT
SPACE
STATISTICS
TELESCOPES
TWO-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS