Bibcode
Putko, J.; Sánchez Almeida, J.; Muñoz-Tuñón, C.; Elmegreen, Bruce; Elmegreen, Debra
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #231, id.#340.02
Advertised on:
1
2018
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
This work is the first study on the 3D shape of starbursting extremely
metal-poor galaxies (XMPs; a galaxy is said to be an XMP if its ionized
gas-phase metallicity is less than 1/10 the solar value). A few hundred
XMPs have been identified in the local universe primarily through mining
the spectroscopic catalog of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and
follow-up observations have shown that metallicity drops significantly
at the starburst (compared to the quiescent component of the galaxy). As
the timescale for gas mixing is short, the metal-poor gas triggering the
starburst must have been accreted recently. This is strong observational
evidence for the cold flow accretion predicted by cosmological models of
galaxy formation, and, in this respect, XMPs seem to be the best local
analogs of the very first galaxies.The ellipsoidal shape of a class of
galaxies can be inferred from the observed axial ratio (q) distribution
(q = minor axis/major axis) of a large sample of randomly-oriented
galaxies. Fitting ellipses to 200 XMPs using r-band SDSS images, we
observe that the axial ratio distribution falls off at q < ~0.4 and q
> ~0.8, and we determine that these falloffs are not due to biases in
the data. The falloff at low axial ratio indicates that the XMPs are
thick for their size, and the falloff at high axial ratio suggests the
vast majority of XMPs are triaxial. We also observe that smaller XMPs
are thicker in proportion to their size, and it is expected that for
decreasing galaxy size the ratio of random to rotational motions
increases, which correlates with increasing relative thickness. The XMPs
are low-redshift dwarf galaxies dominated by dark matter, and our
results are compatible with simulations that have shown dark matter
halos to be triaxial, with triaxial stellar distributions for low-mass
galaxies and with triaxiality increasing over time. We will offer
precise constraints on the 3D shape of XMPs via Bayesian analysis of our
observed axial ratio distribution.This work has been supported by the La
Caixa Foundation and the Estallidos Spanish Ministry of Science and
Innovation grant.