Kavli Affiliate: Philip Marshall
| First 5 Authors: Lindsay Oldham, Matt Auger, Chris Fassnacht, Tommaso Treu, Brendon J. Brewer
| Summary:
We present a new sample of strong gravitational lens systems where both the
foreground lenses and background sources are early-type galaxies. Using imaging
from HST/ACS and Keck/NIRC2, we model the surface brightness distributions and
show that the sources form a distinct population of massive, compact galaxies
at redshifts $0.4 lesssim z lesssim 0.7$, lying systematically below the
size-mass relation of the global elliptical galaxy population at those
redshifts. These may therefore represent relics of high-redshift red nuggets or
their partly-evolved descendants. We exploit the magnifying effect of lensing
to investigate the structural properties, stellar masses and stellar
populations of these objects with a view to understanding their evolution. We
model these objects parametrically and find that they generally require two
S’ersic components to properly describe their light profiles, with one more
spheroidal component alongside a more envelope-like component, which is
slightly more extended though still compact. This is consistent with the
hypothesis of the inside-out growth of these objects via minor mergers. We also
find that the sources can be characterised by red-to-blue colour gradients as a
function of radius which are stronger at low redshift — indicative of ongoing
accretion — but that their environments generally appear consistent with that
of the general elliptical galaxy population, contrary to recent suggestions
that these objects are predominantly associated with clusters.
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