USTC Astronomy Seminar Series: 2023 Fall
Effects of spiral arms on gas and stellar distributions
陈千惠 博士
澳大利亚国立大学
2023/12/19, 2:30pm , the 19th-floor Observatory Hall
报告人:
Qian-Hui Chen is currently pursuing her PhD at the Australian National University, collaborating with Katie Grasha and Emily Wisnioski. Her PhD focuses on unravelling the physical mechanism that drives the spiral arms with spatially-resolved observational data and simulations, including MAGPI, TYPHOON and IllustrisTNG. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Science and Technology of China back in 2021. She devoted her undergrad in the surface brightness radial profiles with MaNGA data, under the guidance of Hong-Xin Zhang and Xu Kong.摘要:
Spiral structures are important drivers of the secular evolution of disc galaxies, however, the origin of spiral arms and their effects on the development of galaxies remain mysterious. In this work, we present two three-armed spiral galaxies at 𝑧 ∼ 0.3 in the Middle Age Galaxy Properties with Integral Field Spectroscopy (MAGPI) survey. Taking advantage of the high spatial resolution (∼ 0.6′′) of the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Unit (MUSE), we investigate the two-dimensional distributions of different spectral parameters: H𝛼, gas-phase metallicity, and D4000. We notice significant offsets in H𝛼 (∼ 0.2 dex) as well as gas-phase metallicities (∼ 0.05 dex) among the spiral arms, downstream and upstream of MAGPI1202197197 (SG1202). This observational signature suggests the spiral structure in SG1202 is consistent with arising from density wave theory. No azimuthal variation in H𝛼 or gas-phase metallicities is observed in MAGPI1204198199 (SG1204), which can be attributed to the tighter spiral arms in SG1204 than SG1202, coming with stronger mixing effects in the disc. The absence of azimuthal D4000 variation in both galaxies suggests the stars at different ages are well-mixed between the spiral arms and distributed around the disc regions. The different azimuthal distributions in H𝛼 and D4000 highlight the importance of time scales traced by various spectral parameters when studying 2D distributions in spiral galaxies. This work demonstrates the feasibility of constraining spiral structures by tracing interstellar medium (ISM) and stellar population at 𝑧 ∼ 0.3, with a plan to expand the study to the full MAGPI survey.