The Evolution of Brightest Cluster and Dwarf Galaxies Using Integral Field Unit Spectroscopy
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THE EVOLUTION OF BRIGHTEST CLUSTER AND DWARF GALAXIES USING INTEGRAL FIELD UNIT SPECTROSCOPY A Dissertation by JIMMY Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Kim-Vy H. Tran Committee Members, Casey J. Papovich Darren L. DePoy William J. Murphy Head of Department, George Welch May 2016 Major Subject: Physics Copyright 2016 Jimmy ABSTRACT The study of galaxy formation and evolution utilizes empirical scaling relations as a tool to better understand complex physical processes that occur below the resolution of observations. New observations of galaxy populations can provide tests of the range of validity for known scaling relations. We test the following scaling relations using IFU spectroscopy of galaxies at opposite ends of the stellar-mass spectrum. Brightest cluster galaxies undergo, on average, more mergers than a typical early- type galaxy. They also lie at the center of their host cluster's gravitational potential well, meaning there is no preferred alignment for mergers. As such, we would ex- pect to find that BCGs should have preferentially lower angular momentum when compared to a population of early-type galaxies. We have spatially mapped the kine- matic properties of 10 nearby brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) in the mass range 10:5 11:9 10 M < Mdyn < 10 M . We find that 30% (3/10) of the BCGs are fast rotators as defined by the ATLAS3D criteria. This is significantly lower than the ATLAS3D population as a whole, however our sample is biased towards higher dynamical-mass 11:5 galaxies. When controlling for dynamical-mass, we find that above Mdyn ∼ 10 M , both samples show the same ratio of slow rotators. This suggests that the relation be- tween galaxy angular momentum and dynamical mass is independent of the number of mergers a galaxy has undergone. Dwarf irregular galaxies are the local universe analogs of the young high-redshift galaxies that eventually merge to form BCGs. The mass-metallicity scaling relation (MZR) says that galaxies with higher stellar-mass have preferentially higher gas metallicity. Mergers have been suggested as a potential cause of the scatter in the ii mass-metallicity relation as pristine gas is driven into a galaxy, diluting the metal content. Two different three-dimensional extensions of MZR, as a function of either HI-gas mass (FMRHI) or star formation rate (FMRSFR), have been suggested to account for the scatter in the MZR. We use our IFU data to study the FMRSFR 6:6 8:8 and FMRHI across the stellar mass range 10 to 10 M . The lowest 1σ scatter of binned means is for the FMRHI (0.01 dex), significantly lower than that of the MZR (0.05 dex). This leads us to conclude that inflows of pristine HI-gas is the best candidate for a physically motivated fundamental metallicity relation. Using the same sample of dwarf irregular galaxies, we investigate the relationship between Hα luminosity surface density (ΣHα) and Balmer optical depth (τb) using the added spatial information provided by IFU spectroscopy. We find a positive correlation between ΣHα and τb in 8 of 11 galaxies. Our spaxels have physical scales ranging from 30 to 80 pc, demonstrating that the correlation between these two variables continues to hold down to spatial scales as low as 30 pc. The positive correlation between ΣHα and τb is consistent even within the lowest mass galaxies. Although brightest cluster galaxies are often considered special populations, we find that they are generally consistent with scaling relations derived for intermediate- mass early-type galaxies. Similarly dwarf irregular galaxies that span a stellar mass 6:6 8:8 range 10 −10 M are consistent with the mass-metallicity relation derived for star 8 11 forming galaxies in the stellar mass range 10 − 10 M . From this we can conclude that these scaling relations are based on fundamental physics that act across an extraordinary range of galaxy mass scales. iii DEDICATION To Mom and Dad, for loving me into the toughest guy you ever met. \You can't get that tough without love. Not `tough love.' Gentle, pure love. Pure love makes tough. Unconditional love from Mommy just like it's supposed to be. And unconditional love from Daddy. Daddy who didn't get the memo that his love was supposed to be different. Unconditional love from both Mommy and Daddy, that'll make you tough. That'll make you twelve feet tall and bulletproof." { Penn Jillette \Sock" iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest gratitude to my graduate advisor Kim-Vy Tran for helping me throughout my graduate student career. I couldn't have done it without your advice and support. Also, thank you to my committee members Casey Papovich, Darren DePoy, and William Murphy for their assistance and advice throughout graduate school. Thank you to the people that have collaborated with me throughout the years on my various scholarly works: Karl Gebhardt, Anja von der Linden, Davide Mar- tizzi, Sarah Brough, Paola Oliva-Altamirano, Rob Sharp, Warrick Couch, Am`elie Saintonge, and Gioacchino Accurso for their valuable insight and assistance. A special thank you to Ryan Quadri and Nick Suntzeff, both of whom I have often turned to for guidance whenever I had a particularly troubling issue to deal with, both professionally and personally. Similarly thank you to Adam Tomczak, Brett Salmon, and Leo Alcorn for their assistance reading over drafts of this dissertation. I'd also like to thank my family, Mom, Dad, Veronica, Mike, Beth, Brent, Kathy, and both Jims for their support and more importantly understanding as I made my way through grad school in a far off and distant land. I would like to thank the VIMOS team for their pipeline, and GitHub for hosting the code used to reduce my data. I would also like to thank Louis Abramson for assistance with GALFIT and Source Extractor. I would like to thank our referee on my first paper, Eric Emsellem, for his excellent feedback, which helped to clarify our narrative as well as our results. The data reduction performed to obtain our results was done on the Brazos v supercomputing cluster at Texas A&M university. I would especially like to thank the Mitchell family for their continuing support and in particular the late George P. Mitchell whose vision and commitment to science and astronomy leaves a lasting legacy. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Depart- ment of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III web site is http://www.sdss3.org/. SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Partici- pating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Carnegie Mel- lon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins Univer- sity, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University. I am very grateful to the entire ALFALFA team for the extensive work involved in observing, processing, flagging, and cataloguing the ALFALFA data, which this paper is based on. I also wish to acknowledge the important contributions of Martha Haynes, Riccardo Giovanelli, and Marco Scodeggio in devising the VIMOS-IFU follow-up project based on ALFALFA-detected dwarf galaxies. I must also thank my fellow graduate students Brett, Mike, Ryan, Adam, Steven, Ben, Leo, Andrew, Ting, Dan, Yi, Peter, Kaitlyn, Vince, Nancy, Wenlong, and Heath vi for the friendship and distractions they have provided me over all these years, I hope we keep in touch, and I wish you all the best as you complete your graduate student careers. Also thank you to Dustin Lorshbough for helping push me along, keeping me on track and in good spirits. To anyone that I might have forgotten, my apologies, I guess I owe you a beer. vii NOMENCLATURE 00 Arcseconds A˚ Angstroms ΛCDM Cold Dark Matter with Dark Energy ΩΛ Density of Dark Energy ΩM Density of Matter 2D Two Dimensional AGC Arecibo General Catalog AGN Active Galactic Nucleus ALFALFA The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey AoN Amplitude over Noise BCG Brightest Cluster Galaxy CCD Charge-Coupled Device D02 Denicol´oet al. 2002 DBSP Double Spectrograph DL Luminosity Distance Dec Declination ESO European Southern Observatory FP Fundamental Plane FML Fundamental Metallicity-Luminosity FMLSFR Fundamental Metallicity-Luminosity Relation as a Function of Star Formation Rate FMLHI Fundamental Metallicity-Luminosity Relation as a Function of HI-gas Mass viii FMR Fundamental Metallicity Relation FMRSFR Fundamental Mass-Metallicity Relation as a Function of Star Formation Rate FMRHI Fundamental Mass-Metallicity Relation as a Function of HI-gas Mass FR Fast Rotator FWHM Full Width at Half Maximum G Gini Coefficient GANDALF Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting algorithm Gyrs Gigayears H0 Hubble Constant HI Neutral Atomic Hydrogen HII Ionized Atomic Hydrogen HR High Resolution IDL Interactive