The MaNGA FIREFLY Value-Added-Catalogue: resolved stellar populations of 10,010 nearby galaxies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive catalog of spatially resolved stellar population properties for over 10,000 nearby galaxies from the MaNGA survey, utilizing spectral fitting with the firefly code and two stellar population models.

Contribution

It provides a new, extensive catalog of stellar properties with dual model variants, enhancing the analysis of galaxy stellar populations and their spatial variations.

Findings

MaStar models yield slightly younger ages and higher metallicities.

FIREFLY stellar masses are systematically lower than some other catalogs.

Stellar ages correlate with spectral indices but show metallicity dependence.

Abstract

We present the MaNGA FIREFLY Value-Added-Catalogue (VAC) - a catalogue of ~3.7 million spatially resolved stellar population properties across 10,010 nearby galaxies from the final data release of the MaNGA survey. The full spectral fitting code firefly is employed to derive parameters such as stellar ages, metallicities, stellar and remnant masses, star formation histories, star formation rates and dust attenuation. In addition to Voronoi-binned measurements, our VAC also provides global properties, such as central values and radial gradients. Two variants of the VAC are available: presenting the results from fits using the M11-MILES and the novel MaStar stellar population models. MaStar allows to constrain the fit over the whole MaNGA wavelength range, extends the age-metallicity parameter space, and uses empirical spectra from the same instrument as MaNGA. The fits employing MaStar models find on average slightly younger ages, higher mass-weighted metallicities and smaller colour excesses. These differences are reduced when matching wavelength range and converging template grids. We further report that FIREFLY stellar masses are systematically lower by ~0.3 dex than masses from the MaNGA PCA and Pipe3D VACs, but match masses from the NSA best with only ~0.1 dex difference. Finally, we show that FIREFLY stellar ages correlate with spectral index age indicators H$\delta_A$ and $D_n$(4000), though with a clear additional metallicity dependence.