Brought to Light III: Colors of Disk and Clump Substructures in Dwarf Early-Type Galaxies of the Fornax Cluster

TL;DR

This study applies a new method to identify and analyze disk and clump substructures in dwarf early-type galaxies in the Fornax Cluster, revealing their contribution to galaxy light and color diversity.

Contribution

It extends previous work by applying a robust substructure detection method to Fornax dwarf ETGs, characterizing their properties and stellar populations.

Findings

Substructures contribute about 8.7% (g-band) and 5.3% (r-band) of galaxy light.

Disk substructures are associated with redder, sometimes bluer, dwarf ETGs.

Clump substructures are found in bluer dwarf ETGs and are always bluer than the diffuse component.

Abstract

It has been well established that dwarf early-type galaxies (ETGs) can often exhibit a complex morphology, whereby faint spiral arms, bars, edge-on disks or clumps are embedded in their main, brighter diffuse body. In our first paper (Brought to Light I: Michea et al. 2021), we developed a new method for robustly identifying and extracting substructures in deep imaging data of dwarf ETGs in the Virgo galaxy cluster. Here we apply our method to a sample of 23 dwarf ETGs in the Fornax galaxy cluster, out of which 9 have disk-like and 14 have clump-like substructures. According to Fornax Deep Survey (FDS) data, our sample constitutes $12\%$ of all dwarf ETGs in Fornax brighter than $\text{M}_{r}=-13$ mag, and contains all cases that unequivocally exhibit substructure features. We use $g$ and $r$-band FDS images to measure the relative contribution of the substructures to the total galaxy light and to estimate their $g-r$ colors. We find that substructures typically contribute $8.7\%$ and $5.3\%$ of the total galaxy light in the $g$ and $r$ bands, respectively, within two effective radii. Disk substructures are usually found in dwarf ETGs with redder global colors, and they can be either as red as or bluer than their galaxy's diffuse component. In contrast, clump substructures are found in comparatively bluer dwarf ETGs, and they are always bluer than their galaxy's diffuse component. These results provide further evidence that dwarf ETGs can hide diverse complex substructures, with stellar populations that can greatly differ from those of the dominant diffuse light in which they are embedded.