A deep AAOmega survey of low-luminosity galaxies in the Shapley Supercluster: Stellar population trends

TL;DR

This study uses optical spectroscopy of low-luminosity galaxies in the Shapley Supercluster to analyze stellar populations and their relation to galaxy velocity dispersion, revealing key scaling relations.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how age, metallicity, and alpha-element abundance scale with velocity dispersion in low-luminosity galaxies, using a wide baseline of data.

Findings

Age scales with velocity dispersion as sigma^0.52

Metallicity Z/H scales as sigma^0.34

Alpha-element ratio [a/Fe] scales as sigma^0.23

Abstract

We present new optical spectroscopy for 342 R<18 galaxies in the Shapley Supercluster obtained with the AAOmega facility at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. We describe the observations and measurements of central velocity dispersion, emission line equivalent widths and absorption line indices. The distinguishing characteristic of the survey is its coverage of a very wide baseline in velocity dispersion (30-300 km/s), while achieving high signal-to-noise ratio throughout (median 60 per Ang). Significant emission at H-alpha was detected in ~20 per cent of red-sequence Shapley members. Using line-ratio diagnostics, we find that the emission is LINER-like at high luminosity, but driven by star-formation in low-luminosity galaxies. We use Lick indices to characterise the absorption spectra. We define a subset of galaxies with very low emission contamination, and fit the index-sigma relations for this subset. Comparing the index-sigma slopes against predictions from single-burst stellar population models, we infer the scaling relations of age, total metallicity, [Z/H], and alpha-element abundance ratio, [a/Fe]. To reproduce the observed index-sigma slopes, all three parameters must increase with increasing velocity dispersion. Specifically, we recover: Age \propto sigma^0.52+/-0.10, Z/H \propto sigma^0.34+/-0.07, and a/Fe \propto sigma^0.23+/-0.06 (error reflects systematic effects), derived over a decade baseline in velocity dispersion. The recovered age-sigma relation is shown to be consistent with the observed evolution in the giant-to-dwarf galaxy ratio in clusters at redshifts z=0.4-0.8. A companion paper will analyse the distribution of age, [Z/H] and [a/Fe] for individual galaxies. (Abridged.)