2009/03/31 by P. Coelho, C. Mendes de Oliveira, R. Cid Fernandes · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Metallicity #Physics #Population #RADIUS #Spectral line #Star formation #Stars #Stellar population #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.14722.x
accepted for publication in MNRAS
arxiv created 2009/03/31 · openalex publication_date 2009/05/20 · arxiv updated 2015/05/12 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We obtained long-slit spectra of high signal-to-noise ratio of the galaxy M32 with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph at the Gemini-North telescope. We analysed the integrated spectra by means of full spectral fitting in order to extract the mixture of stellar populations that best represents its composite nature. Three different galactic radii were analysed, from the nuclear region out to 2 arcmin from the centre. This allows us to compare, for the first time, the results of integrated light spectroscopy with those of resolved colour–magnitude diagrams from the literature. As a main result we propose that an ancient and an intermediate-age population co-exist in M32, and that the balance between these two populations change between the nucleus and outside one effective radius (1reff) in the sense that the contribution from the intermediate population is larger at the nuclear region. We retrieve a smaller signal of a young population at all radii whose origin is unclear and may be a contamination from horizontal branch stars, such as the ones identified by Brown et al. in the nuclear region. We compare our metallicity distribution function for a region 1 to 2 arcmin from the centre to the one obtained with photometric data by Grillmair et al. Both distributions are broad, but our spectroscopically derived distribution has a significant component with [Z/Z⊙]≤−1, which is not found by Grillmair et al.