Towards a New Classification of Early-type Galaxies: An Integral-field View

Falcón-Barroso, J.; Bacon, R.; Cappellari, M.; Davies, R. L.; de Zeeuw, P. T.; Emsellem, E.; Krajnovic, D.; Kuntschner, H.; McDermid, R. M.; Peletier, R. F.; Sarzi, M.; van de Ven, G.
Bibliographical reference

Pathways Through an Eclectic Universe ASP Conference Series, Vol. 390, proceedings of the conference held 23-27 April, 2007 at Santiago del Teide, Tenerife, Spain. Edited by J. H. Knapen, T. J. Mahoney, and A. Vazdekis San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2008., p.227

Advertised on:
6
2008
Number of authors
12
IAC number of authors
0
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
In this proceedings paper we make use of the two-dimensional stellar kinematics of a representative sample of E and S0 galaxies obtained with the SAURON integral-field spectrograph to reveal that early-type galaxies appear in two broad flavors, depending on whether they exhibit clear large-scale rotation or not. We measure the level of rotation via a new parameter (λR) and use it as a basis for a new kinematic classification that separates early-type galaxies into slow and fast rotators. With the aid of broad-band imaging we will reinforce this finding by comparing our kinematic results to the photometric properties of these two classes.