Nuclear properties of a sample of nearby spirals from STIS imaging

Abstract

We present surface photometry for the central regions of a sample of 48 spiral galaxies (mostly unbarred and barred of types Sbc or Sc) observed with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on board the Hubble Space Telescope. Surface brightness profiles were derived and modeled with a Nuker law. We also analyzed archival Wide Field Planetary Camera~2 images with a larger field of view, available for 18 galaxies in our sample. We modeled the extracted bulge surface brightness profiles with an exponential, a de Vaucouleurs or a Sersic profile. In agreement with previous studies, we find that bulges of Sbc galaxies fall into two categories: bulges well described by an exponential profile and those well described by an de Vaucouleurs profile. Only one galaxy requires the use of a more general Sersic profile to properly describe the bulge. Nuclear photometrically distinct components are found in ~55% of the galaxies. For those that we classify as star clusters based on their resolved extent we find absolute magnitudes that are brighter on average than those previously identified in spiral galaxies. This might be due to a bias in our sample toward star forming galaxies, combined with a trend for star forming galaxies to host brighter central clusters.

33 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication on the Astronomical Journal

References in corpus (10)

• The Relation between Black Hole Mass, Bulge Mass, and Near-Infrared Luminosity
• An HST Census of Nuclear Star Clusters in Late-Type Spiral Galaxies: I. Observations and Image Analysis
• Central Structural Parameters of Early-Type Galaxies as Viewed with HST/NICMOS
• Galactic bulges from Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS observations: the lack of r^{1/4} bulges
• Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of Brightest Cluster Galaxies
• Spiral Galaxies with HST/NICMOS. I. Nuclear Morphologies, Color Maps and Distinct Nuclei
• Is there really a Black Hole at the center of NGC 4041? - Constraints from gas kinematics
• The nuclear cusp slopes of dwarf elliptical galaxies
• Spiral Galaxies with HST/NICMOS. II. Isophotal Fits and Nuclear Cusp Slopes
• Searching for Bulges at the End of the Hubble Sequence

Cited by in corpus (27)

• Nuclear Star Clusters
• The Structure of Classical Bulges And Pseudobulges: The Link Between Pseudobulges And Sersic Index
• Bulgeless Giant Galaxies Challenge our Picture of Galaxy Formation by Hierarchical Clustering
• The black hole mass -- stellar velocity dispersion correlation: bulges versus pseudobulges
• The Coincidence of Nuclear Star Clusters and Active Galactic Nuclei
• Bulges Of Nearby Galaxies With Spitzer: Scaling Relations in Pseudobulges and Classical Bulges
• Supermassive black holes do not correlate with dark matter halos of galaxies
• A SINFONI view of Galaxy Centers: Morphology and Kinematics of five Nuclear Star Formation Rings
• Circumnuclear Gas in Seyfert 1 Galaxies: Morphology, Kinematics, and Direct Measurement of Black Hole Masses
• Old and young bulges in late-type disk galaxies
• The Incidence of Active Galactic Nuclei in Pure Disk Galaxies: The Spitzer View
• Upper Limits on the Masses of 105 Supermassive Black Holes from Hubble Space Telescope/Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph Archival Data
• HST/WFPC2 imaging of the circumnuclear structure of LLAGNs. I Data and nuclear morphology
• Supermassive black holes in the Sbc spiral galaxies NGC 3310, NGC 4303 and NGC 4258
• An Observational Guide to Identifying Pseudobulges and Classical Bulges in Disk Galaxies
• Supermassive black hole mass measurements for NGC 1300 and NGC 2748 based on HST emission-line gas kinematics
• The nucleation fraction of Local Volume galaxies
• The dynamical structure of isotropic spherical galaxies with a central black hole
• Caught in formation: the nuclear-cluster-to-be in NGC 2139
• Integral Field Spectroscopy of 23 Spiral Bulges
• Nuclear Properties of Nearby Spiral Galaxies from Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS imaging and STIS Spectroscopy
• A search for ionised gas outflows in an Halpha imaging atlas of nearby LINERs
• The kinematics of young and old stellar populations in nuclear rings of MUSE TIMER galaxies
• Central X-ray point-sources found to be abundant in low-mass, late-type galaxies predicted to contain an intermediate-mass black hole
• Stringent limits on the masses of the supermassive black holes in seven nearby galaxies
• The Central Regions of M31 in the 3 - 5 micron Wavelength Region
• Adaptive optics imaging of the nuclei of Seyfert 2 galaxies: An unexpectedly high incidence of nuclear stellar rings