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Subaru Seminars are
usually held in Room 104 of the Hilo Base Facility, adjacent
to the main lobby. Everyone is welcome to attend. If you would like to
give a seminar, please contact Subaru seminar organizers
(Thayne Currie, Tae-Soo Pyo, Nagayoshi Ohashi)
by email : sseminar_at_subaru.naoj.org (please change"_at" to @).
September 22, Friday, 11am in 104B
" Caught in the act: compact ellipticals in formation "
Anna Ferre-Mateu (Swinburne University of Technology
Compact elliptical galaxies (cEs) are rare in the local Universe, with only about two hundred reported to date. With very compact sizes (100-1000kpc) and intermediate stellar masses (10^8-10^10Msun), they have very high densities that resemble those seen in the cores of massive ellipticals or disks. This suggest that cEs could be, in fact, the remnant of a larger, more massive galaxy that lost its stars via a stripping process. Other evidences support this claim, like the fact that they are typically found near a massive galaxy in dense environments or the fact that some have been caught in the act of stripping. However, some other recently found isolated cEs and cosmological models challenge this view, showing properties that demand another mechanisms of formation. Therefore, as it usually happens in nature, things are not simply white or black, and many factors come into play. Determining the origin and evolutionary stage of these rare cEs is not an easy task, but in this talk I will present a set of tools that can help discriminate between the possible formation mechanisms for cEs.