Spitzer Observations of Passive and Star Forming Early-type Galaxies: an Infrared Color-Color Sequence

TL;DR

This study reveals a tight infrared color-color relation in early-type galaxies, linking star formation activity with galaxy type and gas content, challenging the traditional view of these galaxies as passive systems.

Contribution

It uncovers a universal infrared color-color sequence in early-type galaxies, showing star formation rates vary with stellar mass and gas content, and links these properties across the Hubble sequence.

Findings

Infrared color-color relations are remarkably tight across galaxy types.

Star formation rates in S0 galaxies increase as stellar mass decreases.

Infrared-luminous S0 galaxies can surpass luminous ellipticals in IR brightness.

Abstract

We describe the infrared properties of a large sample of early type galaxies, comparing data from the Spitzer archive with Ks-band emission from 2MASS. While most representations of this data result in correlations with large scatter, we find a remarkably tight relation among colors formed by ratios of luminosities in Spitzer-MIPS (24, 70 and 160 um) bands and the Ks-band. Remarkably, this correlation among E and S0 galaxies follows that of nearby normal galaxies of all morphological types. In particular, the tight infrared color-color correlation for S0 galaxies alone follows that of the entire Hubble sequence of normal galaxies, roughly in order of galaxy type from ellipticals to spirals to irregulars. The specific star formation rate of S0 galaxies estimated from the 24um luminosity increases with decreasing Ks-band luminosity (or stellar mass) from essentially zero, as with most massive ellipticals, to rates typical of irregular galaxies. Moreover, the luminosities of the many infrared-luminous S0 galaxies can significantly exceed those of the most luminous (presumably post-merger) E galaxies. Star formation rates in the most infrared-luminous S0 galaxies approach 1-10 solar masses per year. Consistently with this picture we find that while most early-type galaxies populate an infrared red sequence, about 24% of the objects (mostly S0s) are in an infrared blue cloud together with late type galaxies. For those early-type galaxies also observed at radio frequencies we find that the far-infrared luminosities correlate with the mass of neutral and molecular hydrogen, but the scatter is large. This scatter suggests that the star formation may be intermittent or that similar S0 galaxies with cold gaseous disks of nearly equal mass can have varying radial column density distributions that alter the local and global SF rates.