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Seeing Galaxies through Thick and Thin. I. Optical Opacity Measures in Overlapping Galaxies
We describe the use of partially overlapping galaxies to provide directmeasurements of the effective absorption in galaxy disks, independent ofassumptions about internal disk structure. The nonoverlapping parts ofthe galaxies and symmetry considerations are used to reconstruct, viadifferential photometry, how much background galaxy light is lost inpassing through the foreground disks. Extensive catalog searches andfollow-up imaging yield ~15-25 nearby galaxy pairs suitable for varyingdegrees of our analysis; 11 of the best such examples are presentedhere. From these pairs, we find that interarm extinction is modest,declining from AB~1 mag at 0.3RB25 toessentially zero by RB25; the interarm dust has ascale length consistent with that of the disk starlight. In contrast,dust in spiral arms and resonance rings may be optically thick(AB>2) at virtually any radius. Some disks have flatterextinction curves than the Galaxy, with AB/AI~1.6this is probably the signature of clumpy dust distributions. Even thoughtypical spirals are not optically thick throughout their disks, wherethey are optically thick is correlated with where they are mostluminous: in spiral arms and inner disks. This correlation betweenabsorption and emission regions may account for their apparent surfacebrightness being only mildly dependent on inclination, erroneouslyindicating that spirals are generally optically thick. Taken as anensemble, the opacities of spiral galaxies may be just great enough tosignificantly affect QSO counts, though not enough to cause theirhigh-redshift cutoff. Based in part on archival observations with theNASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) obtained at the Space TelescopeScience Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universitiesfor Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555.
| The Dynamics of Poor Systems of Galaxies
We assemble and observe a sample of poor galaxy systems that is suitablefor testing N-body simulations of hierarchical clustering and otherdynamical halo models. We (1) determine the parameters of the densityprofile rho(r) and the velocity dispersion profile sigma_p(R), (2)separate emission-line galaxies from absorption-line galaxies, examiningthe model parameters and as a function of spectroscopic type, and (3)for the best-behaved subsample, constrain the velocity anisotropyparameter, beta, which determines the shapes of the galaxy orbits. Oursample consists of 20 systems, 12 of which have extended X-ray emissionin the ROSAT All-Sky Survey. We measure the 877 optical spectra ofgalaxies brighter than m_R~15.4 within 1.5 h^-1 Mpc of the systemcenters (we take H_0=100 h km s^-1 Mpc^-1). Thus, we sample the systemmembership to a radius typically three times larger than other recentoptical group surveys. The average system population is 30 galaxies, andthe average line-of-sight velocity dispersion is ~300 km s^-1. TheNavarro, Frenk, & White universal profile and the Hernquist modelboth provide good descriptions of the spatial data. In most cases anisothermal sphere is ruled out. Systems with declining sigma_p(R) arewell-matched by theoretical profiles in which the star-forming galaxieshave predominantly radial orbits (beta>0) many of these galaxies areprobably falling in for the first time. There is significant evidencefor spatial segregation of the spectroscopic classes regardless ofsigma_p(R).
| Total magnitude, radius, colour indices, colour gradients and photometric type of galaxies
We present a catalogue of aperture photometry of galaxies, in UBVRI,assembled from three different origins: (i) an update of the catalogueof Buta et al. (1995) (ii) published photometric profiles and (iii)aperture photometry performed on CCD images. We explored different setsof growth curves to fit these data: (i) The Sersic law, (ii) The net ofgrowth curves used for the preparation of the RC3 and (iii) A linearinterpolation between the de Vaucouleurs (r(1/4) ) and exponential laws.Finally we adopted the latter solution. Fitting these growth curves, wederive (1) the total magnitude, (2) the effective radius, (3) the colourindices and (4) gradients and (5) the photometric type of 5169 galaxies.The photometric type is defined to statistically match the revisedmorphologic type and parametrizes the shape of the growth curve. It iscoded from -9, for very concentrated galaxies, to +10, for diffusegalaxies. Based in part on observations collected at the Haute-ProvenceObservatory.
| The fundamental plane of early-type galaxies: stellar populations and mass-to-light ratio.
We analyse the residuals to the fundamental plane (FP) of ellipticalgalaxies as a function of stellar-population indicators; these are basedon the line-strength parameter Mg_2_ and on UBVRI broad-band colors, andare partly derived from new observations. The effect of the stellarpopulations accounts for approximately half the observed variation ofthe mass-to-light ratio responsible for the FP tilt. The residual tiltcan be explained by the contribution of two additional effects: thedependence of the rotational support, and possibly that of the spatialstructure, on the luminosity. We conclude to a constancy of thedynamical-to-stellar mass ratio. This probably extends to globularclusters as well, but the dominant factor would be here the luminositydependence of the structure rather than that of the stellar population.This result also implies a constancy of the fraction of dark matter overall the scalelength covered by stellar systems. Our compilation ofinternal stellar kinematics of galaxies is appended.
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