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The thickness of stellar disks in early-type galaxies

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Abstract

We suggest and justify a new photometric method enabling the derivation of the relative thickness of a galactic disk from the two-dimensional surface-brightness distribution of the galaxy in the plane of the sky. The method is applied to images of 45 early-type (S0-Sb) galaxies with known radial exponential or piece-wise-exponential (with a flatter outer profile) surface-brightness distributions. The data were taken from the open SDSS archive. The statistics of the estimated relative thicknesses of the stellar disks of early-type galaxies show the following features. The disks of lenticular and spiral early-type galaxies have similar thickness. The presence of a bar results in only a slight increase of the thickness. However, there is a substantial difference between the thicknesses of disks with a single exponential brightness profile and exponential disks that represent the inner segments of Type III profiles (after Erwin); i.e., they have an outer exponential disk with a larger characteristic scale. The disks are significantly thicker in the former than in the latter case. This may provide evidence that a single exponential scale in a disk surface-brightness distribution forms due to viscosity effects acting over the entire period of star-formation evolution in the disk.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

    E. M. Chudakova & O. K. Sil’chenko

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  1. E. M. Chudakova
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  2. O. K. Sil’chenko
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Correspondence to E. M. Chudakova.

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Original Russian Text © E.M. Chudakova, O.K. Sil’chenko, 2014, published in Astronomicheskii Zhurnal, 2014, Vol. 91, No. 5, pp. 343–352.

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Chudakova, E.M., Sil’chenko, O.K. The thickness of stellar disks in early-type galaxies. Astron. Rep. 58, 281–290 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063772914050023

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063772914050023

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