Surface Brightness Fluctuations for constraining the chemical enrichment of massive galaxies

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Surface Brightness Fluctuations spectra can reveal detailed chemical enrichment histories of massive galaxies, especially metal-poor components, surpassing traditional mean flux analyses.

Contribution

It introduces high-resolution SBF spectra based on empirical stars, enabling new insights into galaxy chemical evolution and quenching epochs.

Findings

SBF spectra can detect metal-poor stellar components at 1% level.

SBF analysis constrains the epoch of chemical enrichment and quenching.

SBF provides more detailed stellar population information than mean flux methods.

Abstract

Based on very deep photometry, Surface Brightness Fluctuations (SBF) have been traditionally used to determine galaxy distances. We have recently computed SBF spectra of stellar populations at moderately high resolution, which are fully based on empirical stars. We show that the SBF spectra provide an unprecedented potential for stellar population studies that, so far, have been tackled on the basis of the mean fluxes. We find that the SBFs are able to unveil metal-poor stellar components at the one percent level, which are not possible to disentangle with the standard analysis. As these metal-poor components correspond to the first stages of the chemical enrichment, the SBF analysis provides stringent constrains on the quenching epoch.