Structure and Substructure of Galactic Spheroids

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of detailed structural and compositional analysis of galactic spheroids for understanding galaxy formation, emphasizing upcoming observational and theoretical advancements that will enhance our knowledge of these stellar systems.

Contribution

It highlights the potential of new observational techniques and theoretical models to improve understanding of galactic spheroids' formation and evolution.

Findings

Upcoming wide-field surveys will enable comprehensive studies of spheroids.

Adaptive optics will allow detailed analysis of individual stars in distant galaxies.

Theoretical models are crucial for interpreting new observational data.

Abstract

The full spatio-chemo-dynamical structure of galaxies of all types and environments at low redshift provides a critical accompaniment to observations of galaxy formation at high redshift. The next decade brings the observational opportunity to strongly constrain nearby galaxies' histories of star formation and assembly, especially in the spheroids that comprise the large majority of the stellar mass in the Universe but have until now been difficult to study. In order to constrain the pathways to building up the spheroidal "red-sequence", various standard techniques in photometry and spectroscopy, particularly with resolved tracer populations like globular clusters and planetary nebulae, can be scaled up to comprehensive surveys as improved wide-field instrumentation is increasingly available. At the same time, progress in adaptive optics on giant telescopes could for the first time permit deep, resolved photometric and spectroscopic analysis of large samples of individual stars in these systems, thereby revolutionizing galaxy studies. Strong theoretical support is needed in order to understand the new observational constraints via detailed modeling and self-consistent simulations of star and galaxy formation throughout cosmic time.