Actas de congresos
The distribution of stellar populations within galaxies
Fecha
2014Registro en:
Latin American Regional IAU Meeting, 14, 2013, Florianópolis.
Autor
Novais, Patricia Martins de
Junior, Laerte Sodre
Institución
Resumen
The study of stellar populations in galaxies is particularly interesting, since they are a fossil record of several physical processes associated with the formation and evolution of galaxies. In this work we present the first results of our approach to study the spatial distribution of stellar populations inside galaxies. We are using ugriz magnitudes and principal component analysis (PCA) to obtain pixel-by-pixel proxies of the stellar populations and their distributions inside each galaxy. The distribution of these populations are then investigated with a variety of statistical tools, including Gini Indices and the Euler-Poincaré characteristic. Our approach aims to be a step forward with respect to the conventional profile fitting, allowing to obtain quantitative estimates on how the different stellar populations are distributed within a galaxy, bringing hints on how galaxies grow and evolve. The pixel-by-pixel analysis of a small sample of 15 galaxies of different types show that the stellar populations tend to evolve from inside to out in spiral and late spiral galaxies, while elliptical galaxies seem to have young stellar populations in the center. This first results show that this approach is effective and will be explored and improve in future works.