Kinematic properties of early-type galaxy haloes using planetary nebulae
Nov, 2008Citations per year
Abstract: (arXiv)
We present new planetary nebulae (PNe) positions, radial velocities, and magnitudes for 6 early-type galaxies obtained with the Planetary Nebulae Spectrograph, their two-dimensional velocity and velocity dispersion fields. We extend this study to include an additional 10 early-type galaxies with PNe radial velocity measurements available from the literature, to obtain a broader description of the outer-halo kinematics in early-type galaxies. These data extend the information derived from stellar kinematics to typically up to ~8 Re. The combination of photometry, stellar and PNe kinematics shows: i) good agreement between the PNe number density and the stellar surface brightness in the region where the two data sets overlap/ ii) good agreement between PNe and stellar kinematics/ iii) that the mean rms velocity profiles fall into two groups: with of the galaxies characterized by slowly decreasing profiles and the remainder having steeply falling profiles/ iv) a larger variety of velocity dispersion profiles/ v) that twists and misalignments in the velocity fields are more frequent at large radii, including some fast rotators/ vi) that outer haloes are characterised by more complex radial profiles of the specific angular momentum-related lambda_R parameter than observed within 1Re/ vii) that many objects are more rotationally dominated at large radii than in their central parts/ and viii) that the halo kinematics are correlated with other galaxy properties, such as total luminosity, isophotal shape, total stellar mass, V/sigma, and alpha parameter, with a clear separation between fast and slow rotators.References(111)
Figures(82)