Spectral Energy Distribution Mapping of Two Elliptical Galaxies on Sub-kpc Scales

Abstract

We use high-resolution Herschel-PACS data of two nearby elliptical galaxies, IC 1459 and NGC 2768, to characterize their dust and stellar content. IC 1459 and NGC 2768 have an unusually large amount of dust for elliptical galaxies ((1-3) × 10^5 M_☉ ); this dust is also not distributed along the stellar content. Using data from GALEX (ultra-violet) to PACS (far-infrared, FIR), we analyze the spectral energy distribution (SED) of these galaxies with CIGALEMC as a function of the projected position, binning images in 7.″2 pixels. From this analysis, we derive maps of SED parameters, such as the metallicity, the stellar mass, the fraction of young stars, and the dust mass. The larger amount of dust in FIR maps seems related in our model to a larger fraction of young stars which can reach up to 4% in the dustier area. The young stellar population is fitted as a recent (∼0.5 Gyr) short burst of star formation for both galaxies. The metallicities, which are fairly large at the center of both galaxies, decrease with the radial distance with a fairly steep gradient for elliptical galaxies.