Probing the mass assembly of massive nearby galaxies with deep imaging

Abstract

According to a popular scenario supported by numerical models, the mass assembly and growth of massive galaxies, in particular the Early-Type Galaxies (ETGs), is, below a redshift of 1, mainly due to the accretion of multiple gas--poor satellites. In order to get observational evidence of the role played by minor dry mergers, we are obtaining extremely deep optical images of a complete volume limited sample of nearby ETGs. These observations, done with the CFHT as part of the \AD, NGVS and MATLAS projects, reach a stunning 28.5)29 mag.arcsec-2 surface brightness limit in the g' band. They allow us to detect the relics of past collisions such as faint stellar tidal tails as well as the very extended stellar halos which keep the memory of the last episodes of galactic accretion. Images and preliminary results from this on-going survey are presented, in particular a possible correlation between the fine structure index (which parametrizes the amount of tidal perturbation) of the ETGs, their stellar mass, effective radius and gas content.

4 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the IAU S295: The intriguing life of massive galaxies, editors D. Thomas, A. Pasquali & I. Ferreras

References in corpus (3)

• The Atlas3D project - XX. Mass-size and mass-sigma distributions of early-type galaxies: bulge fraction drives kinematics, mass-to-light ratio, molecular gas fraction and stellar initial mass function
• Size evolution of the most massive galaxies at 1.7<z<3 from GOODS NICMOS survey imaging
• The Environmental Dependence of the Incidence of Galactic Tidal Features

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Flattened structures of dwarf satellites around massive host galaxies in the MATLAS low-to-moderate density fields
• Deciphering an evolutionary sequence of merger stages in infrared-luminous starburst galaxies at z ~ 0.7
• Ubiquitous signs of interactions in early-type galaxies with prolate rotation