Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 795, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/795/2/136
Keywords
galaxies: individual (NGC 522, NGC 891, NGC 1055, NGC 4013, NGC 4144, NGC 4244, NGC 4565); galaxies: spiral; galaxies: stellar content
Categories
Funding
- U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) [AST-1009471]
- Leverhulme Foundation
- Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
- NSF
- U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science as part of the Open Science Grid
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences [1009471] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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We investigate the stellar disk structure of six nearby edge-on spiral galaxies using high-resolution JHK(s)-band images and three-dimensional radiative transfer models. To explore how mass and environment shape spiral disks, we selected galaxies with rotational velocities between 69 km s(-1) < V-rot < 245 km s(-1), and two with unusual morphologies. We find a wide diversity of disk structure. Of the fast-rotating (V-rot > 150 km s(-1)) galaxies, only NGC 4013 has the super-thin+thin+thick nested disk structure seen in NGC 891 and the Milky Way, albeit with decreased oblateness, while NGC 1055, a disturbed massive spiral galaxy, contains disks with h(z) less than or similar to 200 pc. NGC 4565, another fast-rotator, contains a prominent ring at a radius similar to 5 kpc but no super-thin disk. Despite these differences, all fast-rotating galaxies in our sample have inner truncations in at least one of their disks. These truncations lead to Freeman Type II profiles when projected face-on. Slow-rotating galaxies are less complex, lacking inner disk truncations and requiring fewer disk components to reproduce their light distributions. Superthin disk components in undisturbed disks contribute similar to 25% of the total K-s-band light, up to that of the thin-disk contribution. The presence of super-thin disks correlates with infrared flux ratios; galaxies with super-thin disks have f(Ks)/f(60) mu m <= 0.12 for integrated light, consistent with super-thin disks being regions of ongoing star-formation. Attenuation-corrected vertical color gradients in (J - K-s) correlate with the observed disk structure and are consistent with population gradients with young-to-intermediate ages closer to the mid-plane, indicating that disk heating-or cooling-is a ubiquitous phenomenon.
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