A MaNGA about the Legacy I: Connecting the Assembly of Stellar Halo with the Average Star Formation History in Low-Redshift Massive Galaxies

Abstract

We investigate the connection between stellar mass distribution, assembly history, and star formation timescales in low-redshift massive early-type galaxies (ETGs) by combining deep LegacySurvey imaging with MaNGA's spatially resolved spectroscopy. Focusing on stellar population properties, especially the [Mg/Fe] abundance ratio, we analyze stacked spectra using both absorption line indices and full-spectrum fitting. We find that, among massive ETGs with identical average stellar mass distributions beyond 20 kpc, those with higher central velocity dispersion (${\sigma }_{cen}$) are older and more $\alpha$-enhanced, suggesting a connection between the in-situ star formation in the past and the central gravitational potential today for massive ETGs with a similar stellar accretion history. Conversely, at fixed ${\sigma }_{cen}$ and total stellar mass, galaxies with more extended stellar halos show lower [Fe/H], higher [Mg/Fe], and older ages, indicating an intriguing link between early starburst and quenching and later ex-situ assembly. These results demonstrate that the evolution of massive galaxies cannot be fully described by simple scaling relations alone, as the interplay between in-situ star formation and ex-situ accretion leaves distinct imprints in both their inner and outer stellar populations. Our findings highlight the importance of extending stellar population studies to large radii and underscore the scientific potential of next-generation IFU surveys and deep, high-resolution spectroscopy for probing the galaxy-halo connection.

27 pages, 16 figures

References in corpus (53)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• 3D-HST+CANDELS: The Evolution of the Galaxy Size-Mass Distribution since $z=3$
• The MUSE second-generation VLT instrument
• Evolutionary Stellar Population Synthesis with MILES. Part I: The Base Models and a New Line Index System
• Stellar Population Inference with Prospector
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: instrument specification and target selection
• The James Webb Space Telescope Mission
• Overview of the Instrumentation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• The Atlas3D Project - XXX. Star formation histories and stellar population scaling relations of early-type galaxies
• The Data Reduction Pipeline for the SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU Galaxy Survey
• Ages and metallicities of early-type galaxies in the SDSS: new insight into the physical origin of the colour-magnitude and the Mg2-sigmaV relations
• The SDSS-IV MaNGA Sample: Design, Optimization, and Usage Considerations
• SDSS-IV MaNGA IFS Galaxy Survey --- Survey Design, Execution, and Initial Data Quality
• CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey. II. First public data release
• Radial variations in the stellar initial mass function of early-type galaxies
• Superdense massive galaxies in the Nearby Universe
• A chronicle of galaxy mass assembly in the EAGLE simulation
• ProSpect: Generating Spectral Energy Distributions with Complex Star Formation and Metallicity Histories
• How do central and satellite galaxies quench? -- Insights from spatially resolved spectroscopy in the MaNGA survey
• SDSS-IV DR17: Final Release of MaNGA PyMorph Photometric and Deep Learning Morphological Catalogs
• The stellar accretion origin of stellar population gradients in massive galaxies at large radii
• The Extended IRTF Spectral Library: Expanded coverage in metallicity, temperature, and surface gravity
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Global stellar populations on the size-mass plane
• Timing the formation and assembly of early-type galaxies via spatially resolved stellar populations analysis
• Two new confirmed massive relic galaxies: red nuggets in the present-day Universe
• The Stellar Initial Mass Function in Early-Type Galaxies From Absorption Line Spectroscopy. IV. A Super-Salpeter IMF in the center of NGC 1407 from Non-Parametric Models
• Skycorr: A general tool for spectroscopic sky subtraction
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Radial Gradients in Stellar Population Properties of Early-Type and Late-Type Galaxies
• A Self-Calibrating Halo-Based Group Finder: Application to SDSS
• SPIDER X - Environmental effects in central and satellite early-type galaxies through the stellar fossil record
• The MASSIVE SURVEY XVI. The Stellar Initial Mass Function in the Center of MASSIVE Early-Type Galaxies
• Accreted or Not Accreted? The Fraction of Accreted Mass in Galaxies from Simulations and Observations
• Reaching for the Edge I: Probing the Outskirts of Massive Galaxies with HSC, DECaLS, SDSS, and Dragonfly
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Integral-field kinematics and stellar population of a sample of galaxies with counter-rotating stellar disks selected from about 4000 galaxies
• Comparing PyMorph and SDSS photometry. I. Background sky and model fitting effects
• sMILES SSPs: A Library of Semi-Empirical MILES Stellar Population Models with Variable [$\alpha$/Fe] Abundances
• From Carbon to Cobalt: Chemical compositions and ages of $z\sim 0.7$ quiescent galaxies
• The dark side of galaxy stellar populations I: The stellar-to-halo mass relation and the velocity dispersion - halo mass relation
• Hector - a new massively multiplexed IFS instrument for the Anglo-Australian Telescope
• The Outer Stellar Mass of Massive Galaxies: A Simple Tracer of Halo Mass with Scatter Comparable to Richness and Reduced Projection Effects
• The SAMI-Fornax Dwarfs Survey III: Evolution of [$\alpha$/Fe] in dwarfs, from Galaxy Clusters to the Local Group
• Stellar Population and Elemental Abundance Gradients of Early-type Galaxies
• Velocity Dispersions of Massive Quiescent Galaxies from Weak Lensing and Spectroscopy
• The Influence of Environment on the Chemical Evolution in Low-mass Galaxies
• Ages and metallicities of quiescent galaxies: confronting broadband ($UVJ$) colours with stellar absorption lines
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: The [$\alpha$/Fe] of Early-Type Galaxies
• Age and metal gradients in massive quiescent galaxies at $0.6\lesssim z\lesssim 1.0$: implications for quenching and assembly histories
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: The effect of stellar mass and halo mass on the assembly histories of satellite galaxies
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Trends in [α/Fe] as a Function of Morphology and Environment
• The Outskirt Stellar Mass of Low-Redshift Massive Galaxies is an Excellent Halo Mass Proxy in Illustris/IllustrisTNG Simulations