Deep photometry of galaxies in the VEGAS survey: the case of NGC 4472

TL;DR

This paper presents deep photometric analysis of NGC 4472 and nearby early-type galaxies using VST-VEGAS data to explore their formation history and faint substructures, enhancing understanding of galaxy evolution.

Contribution

It provides detailed surface photometry of NGC 4472 and surrounding ETGs, utilizing new g and i band images from the VEGAS survey to investigate galaxy formation and faint features.

Findings

Detection of faint substructures around NGC 4472

Insights into the galaxy's formation history

High-quality photometric data of nearby ETGs

Abstract

The VST-VEGAS project is aimed at observing and studying a rich sample of nearby early-type galaxies in order to systematically characterize their properties over a wide baseline of sizes and out to the faint outskirts where data are rather scarce so far. The external regions of galaxies more easily retain signatures about the formation and evolution mechanisms which shaped them, as their relaxation time are longer, and they are more weakly influenced by processes such as mergers, secular evolution, central black hole activity, and supernova feedback on the ISM, which tend to level age and metallicity gradients. The collection of a wide photometric dataset of a large number of galaxies in various environmental conditions, may help to shed light on these questions. To this end VEGAS exploits the potential of the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) which provides high quality images of one square degree field of view in order to satisfy both the requirement of high resolution data and the need of studying nearby, and thus large, objects. We present a detailed study of the surface photometry of the elliptical galaxy NGC4472 and of smaller ETGs in its field, performed by using new g and i bands images to constrain the formation history of this nearby giant galaxy, and to investigate the presence of very faint substructures in its surroundings.