The CALIFA survey across the Hubble sequence

Abstract

Various different physical processes contribute to the star formation and stellar mass assembly histories of galaxies. One important approach to understanding the significance of these different processes on galaxy evolution is the study of the stellar population content of today's galaxies in a spatially resolved manner. The aim of this paper is to characterize in detail the radial structure of stellar population properties of galaxies in the nearby universe, based on a uniquely large galaxy sample, considering the quality and coverage of the data. The sample under study was drawn from the CALIFA survey and contains 300 galaxies observed with integral field spectroscopy. These cover a wide range of Hubble types, from spheroids to spiral galaxies, while stellar masses range from M 10 9 to 7 10 11 M . We apply the fossil record method based on spectral synthesis techniques to recover the following physical properties for each spatial resolution element in our target galaxies: the stellar mass surface density ( ), stellar extinction (A V ), light-weighted and mass-weighted ages ( log age L , log age M ), and mass-weighted metallicity ( log Z M ).