Bibcode
Greggio, L.; Falomo, R.; Scarpa, R.
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 861, Issue 2, article id. 81, 7 pp. (2018).
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7
2018
Journal
Citations
2
Refereed citations
2
Description
We report on the detection of a stellar halo around NGC 1560, a
109 M ⊙ spiral galaxy member of the Maffei
group. We obtained deep images in the r- and i-bands using the 10.4 m
Gran Telescopio Canarias in a field centered at ∼3.7 arcmin
(projected distance of 3.5 kpc) from the center of this galaxy. The
luminosity function and the color–magnitude diagram show a clear
excess of stars with respect to the expected foreground level at
magnitudes fainter than the red giant branch tip at the distance of NGC
1560. The colors of the halo stars imply a metallicity of Z ∼ Z
⊙/50, while their counts correspond to a stellar mass of
∼107 M ⊙ in the sampled region. Assuming a
power-law profile for the surface mass density of the halo, our data
suggest a total stellar mass of 108 M ⊙ for
the halo of NGC 1560.