Census and classification of low-surface-brightness structures in nearby early-type galaxies from the MATLAS survey

TL;DR

This study visually classifies low-surface-brightness structures in 177 nearby early-type galaxies using deep imaging, revealing their incidence and dependence on galaxy mass and environment, and highlighting observational challenges.

Contribution

First comprehensive visual classification of faint outer structures in a large galaxy sample using deep images, providing new insights into galaxy morphology and evolution.

Findings

Incidence of shells, streams, and tails is about 15%.

Higher galaxy mass correlates with increased incidence of certain structures.

Galactic cirrus incidence anticorrelates with environment density.

Abstract

The morphology of galaxies gives essential constraints on the models of galaxy evolution. The morphology of the features in the low-surface-brightness regions of galaxies has not been fully explored yet because of observational difficulties. Here we present the results of our visual inspections of very deep images of a large volume-limited sample of 177 nearby massive early-type galaxies (ETGs) from the MATLAS survey. The images reach a surface-brightness limit of $28.5-29$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$ in the $g'$ band. Using a dedicated navigation tool and questionnaire, we looked for structures at the outskirts of the galaxies such as tidal shells, streams, tails, disturbed outer isophotes or peripheral star-forming disks, and simultaneously noted the presence of contaminating sources, such as Galactic cirrus. We also inspected internal sub-structures such as bars and dust lanes. We discuss the reliability of this visual classification investigating the variety of answers made by the participants. We present the incidence of these structures and the trends of the incidence with the mass of the host galaxy and the density of its environment. We find an incidence of shells, stream and tails of approximately 15%, about the same for each category. For galaxies with masses over $10^{11}$ M$_\odot$, the incidence of shells and streams increases about 1.7 times. We also note a strong unexpected anticorrelation of the incidence of Galactic cirrus with the environment density of the target galaxy. Correlations with other properties of the galaxies, and comparisons to model predictions, will be presented in future papers.