Bibcode
Bakos, J.; Trujillo, I.
Bibliographical reference
Memorie della Societa Astronomica Italiana Supplement, v.25, p.21 (2013)
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2013
Citations
4
Refereed citations
4
Description
Taking advantage of ultra-deep imaging of SDSS Stripe82 and
the Hubble Ultra Deep Field by HST, we explore the properties of stellar
halos at two relevant epochs of cosmic history. At z˜0 we find
that the radial surface brightness profiles of disks have a smooth
continuation into the stellar halo that starts to affect the surface
brightness profiles at mu r'˜28 {mag
arcsec-2}, and at a radial distance of gtrsim 4-10 inner
scale-lengths. The light contribution of the stellar halo to the total
galaxy light varies from ˜1% to ˜5%, but in case of ongoing
mergers, the halo light fraction can be as high as ˜10%. The
integrated (g'-r') color of the stellar halo of our galaxies range from
˜0.4 to ˜1.2. By confronting these colors with model
predictions, these halos can be attributed to moderately aged and
metal-poor populations, however the extreme red colors (˜1) cannot
be explained by populations of conventional IMFs. Very red halo colors
can be attributed to stellar populations dominated by very low mass
stars of low to intermediate metallicity produced by bottom-heavy IMFs.
At z˜1 stellar halos appear to be ˜2 magnitudes brighter
than their local counterparts, meanwhile they exhibit bluer colors
((g'-r')≲0.3 mag), as well. The stellar populations corresponding
to these colors are compatible with having ages ≲1 Gyr. This latter
observation strongly suggests the possibility that these halos were
formed between z˜1 and z˜2. This result matches very well
the theoretical predictions that locate most of the formation of the
stellar halos at those early epochs. A pure passive evolutionary
scenario, where the stellar populations of our high-z haloes simply fade
to match the stellar halo properties found in the local universe, is
consistent with our data.