Surface Brightness Fluctuations: An independent implementation of the method to uncover hidden stellar populations

Titulaer, Lei (2024) Surface Brightness Fluctuations: An independent implementation of the method to uncover hidden stellar populations. Master's Thesis / Essay, Astronomy.

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Abstract

Surface Brightness Fluctuations (sbf) are variations in the smooth surface brightness profile of a galaxy due to the stochastic nature of the distribution of stars in the profile. The magnitude of these fluctuations is solely dependent on the distance to the galaxy and its underlying stellar population. Historically, sbf have mainly been used as a tool for measuring extragalactic distances, and it has been very successful to this extent. However, there consists a potential to use this method the other way around, and learn about stellar populations. Rodr´ıguez-Beltr´an et al. (2021) have shown that combining sbf-colors and standard integrated colors can potentially reveal hidden metal-poor components in elliptical galaxies. In this work, we provide an attempt to employ these results. We provide a new implementation of the measurement pipeline required to measure the sbf magnitude. We use this implementation to measure the sbf magnitude in four different HST bands, ranging from the visible wavelengths to the infrared. We show that the parameter space that is populated by these galaxies in sbf color-space is vastly different from the parameter space covered using mean colors, confirming the predictions by Rodr´ıguez-Beltr´an et al. (2021). This indicates that the sbf method pertains an as of yet unemployed potential to learn about stellar populations in these galaxies.

Item Type:	Thesis (Master's Thesis / Essay)
Supervisor name:	Peletier, R.F.
Degree programme:	Astronomy
Thesis type:	Master's Thesis / Essay
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	21 Aug 2024 09:53
Last Modified:	10 Sep 2024 09:21
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/33931

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