Kinematics And Stellar Population In Isolated Lenticular Galaxies

TL;DR

This study investigates the stellar and gaseous kinematics, stellar populations, and gas metallicity in isolated lenticular galaxies, revealing diverse formation histories, prevalent extended gas disks, and external gas accretion as a key process.

Contribution

It provides new observational evidence on the kinematics and stellar populations of isolated lenticular galaxies, highlighting external gas accretion and counterrotation phenomena.

Findings

No specific formation time frame for isolated lenticular galaxies.

Majority have extended ionized-gas disks, with half showing counterrotation.

Outer gas metallicity suggests satellite merging as the main accretion source.

Abstract

By combining new long-slit spectral data obtained with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) for 9 galaxies with previously published our observations for additional 12 galaxies we study the stellar and gaseous kinematics as well as radially resolved stellar population properties and ionized gas metallicity and excitation for a sample of isolated lenticular galaxies. We have found that there is no particular time frame of formation for the isolated lenticular galaxies: the mean stellar ages of the bulges and disks are distributed between 1 and > 13 Gyr, and the bulge and the disk in every galaxy formed synchronously demonstrating similar stellar ages and magnesium-to-iron ratios. Extended ionized-gas disks are found in the majority of the isolated lenticular galaxies, in 72%$\pm$11%. The half of all extended gaseous disks demonstrate visible counterrotation with respect to their stellar counterparts. We argue that just such fraction of projected counterrotation is expected if all the gas in isolated lenticular galaxies is accreted from outside, under the assumption of isotropically distributed external sources. A very narrow range of the gas oxygen abundances found by us for the outer ionized gas disks excited by young stars, [O/H] from 0.0 to +0.2 dex, gives evidence for the satellite merging as the most probable source of this accretion. At last we formulate a hypothesis that morphological type of a field disk galaxy is completely determined by the outer cold-gas accretion regime.