The Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey. VIII. Demographics of Bulges along the Hubble Sequence

TL;DR

This study performs detailed multi-component decomposition of 312 disk galaxies to analyze bulge demographics along the Hubble sequence, revealing insights into bulge prominence and the effects of bars.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive modeling approach including multiple galaxy features and compares results with previous surveys, highlighting differences in bulge parameter estimates.

Findings

Bulge prominence decreases from early to late-type galaxies.

Significant differences in bulge parameters arise from different modeling strategies.

Barred and unbarred galaxies have similar bulge prominence.

Abstract

We present multi-component decomposition of high-quality $R$-band images of 312 disk galaxies from the Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey. In addition to bulges and disks, we successfully model nuclei, bars, disk breaks, nuclear/inner lenses, and inner rings. Our modeling strategy treats nuclear rings and nuclear bars as part of the bulge component, while other features such as spiral arms, outer lenses, and outer rings are omitted from the fits because they are not crucial for accurate bulge measurements. The error budget of bulge parameters includes the uncertainties from sky level measurements and model assumptions. Comparison with multi-component decomposition from the \textit{Spitzer} Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies reveals broad agreement for the majority of the overlapping galaxies, but for a considerable fraction of galaxies there are significant differences in bulge parameters caused by different strategies in model construction. We confirm that on average bulge prominence decreases from early to late-type disk galaxies, although the large scatter of bulge-to-total ratios in each morphological bin limits the application of Hubble type as an accurate predictor of bulge-to-total ratio. In contrast with previous studies claiming that barred galaxies host weaker bulges, we find that barred and unbarred spiral galaxies have similar bulge prominence.