Spectro-photometric decomposition of galaxy structural components (1901.08075v1)

Abstract: Galaxies are complex systems made up of different structural components such as bulges, discs, and bars. Understanding galaxy evolution requires unveiling, independently, their history of stellar mass and metallicity assembly. We introduce C2D, a new algorithm to perform spectro-photometric multi-component decompositions of integral field spectroscopy (IFS) datacubes. The galaxy surface-brightness distribution at each wavelength (quasi-monochromatic image) is fitted using GASP2D, a 2D photometric decomposition code. As a result, C2D provides both a characteristic one-dimensional spectra and a full datacube with all the spatial and spectral information for every component included in the fit. We show the basic steps of the C2D spectro-photometric fitting procedure, tests on mock datacubes demonstrating its reliability, and a first application of C2D to a sample of three early-type galaxies (ETGs) observed within the CALIFA survey. The resulting datacubes from C2D are processed through the PIPE3D pipeline obtaining both the stellar populations and ionised gas properties of bulges and discs. This paper presents an overview of the potential of C2D+PIPE3D to unveil the formation and evolution of galaxies.