GHOSTS - Bulges, Halos, and the Resolved Stellar Outskirts of Massive Disk Galaxies

TL;DR

The GHOSTS survey investigates the properties of stellar envelopes in 14 nearby disk galaxies, revealing extended, flattened halos with specific density profiles, metallicity characteristics, and substructure variations, linking bulge and halo formation processes.

Contribution

This study provides detailed measurements of stellar envelope properties in nearby disk galaxies, highlighting the connection between bulge and halo formation and challenging hierarchical formation models.

Findings

Massive galaxies have extended stellar envelopes with Sersic or power-law profiles.

Halo shapes are highly flattened with minor- to major-axis ratios around 0.6.

Halos show small metallicity gradients and some exhibit substructure.

Abstract

Our GHOSTS survey measures the stellar envelope properties of 14 nearby disk galaxies by imaging their resolved stellar populations with HST/ACS&WFPC2. Most of the massive galaxies in the sample (Vrot >200 km/s) have very extended stellar envelopes with Sersic law profiles or mu(r)~r^-2.5 power law profiles in the outer regions. For these massive galaxies we can fit the central bulge light and the outer halo out to 30 kpc with one and the same Sersic profile and the stellar surface density of the profiles correlate with Hubble type and bulge- to-disk ratio. This suggests that the central bulges and inner halos are created in the same process. Smaller galaxies (Vrot ~100 km/s) have much smaller stellar envelopes, but depending on geometry, they could still be more luminous than expected from satellite remnants in hierarchical galaxy formation models. Alternatively, they could be created by disk heating through the bombardment of small dark matter sub-halos. The halos we fit are highly flattened, with minor- over-ma jor axis ratios c/a=0.6. The halos are somewhat more compact than hierarchical model predictions. The halos show small metallicity gradient out to 30 kpc and the massive galaxies have typical [Fe/H]~-0.8. We find indications of halo substructure in many galaxies, but some halos seem remarkable smooth.