Kinematics and stellar populations of nearby groups

Abstract

Although one of the most common environments in the universe, groups of galaxies have been relatively little studied. The majority of papers devoted to understand the role of the environment on the galactic properties made use of the rare and extreme environment of galaxy clusters. However, the group environment can give us the best informations about the galaxy evolution and the physical processes that trigger (or suppress) the formation of new stars.In this thesis, we will investigate the kinematics and the stellar populations in five nearby groups of galaxies, using spectroscopy obtained at the Blanco telescope, of groups HCG 22, HCG 42, HCG 62, NGC 193 e NGC 7619. Internal velocity dispersions and metallicities will be obtained for typically 40 galaxies in each of these groups, and then compared to literature groups (i.e., Mendel et al. 2008, 2009) and clusters (i.e., Poggianti el al. 2004).In addition to the optical characteristics, we will study the X-rays emission properties of the groups, using data taken from Chandra and XMM-Newton telescopes, to study the interactions between the galaxies and the hot intra-group gas. Thus, we will seek the understanding of the dominant physical mechanisms during the falling of galaxies into this environment, and the influence of the environment in the observational properties like morphology and star formation rate.Finally, we will build a toolkit for the photometric study of galaxies in the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS) in order to measure properties like structural parameters, age, metallicities and alpha enhancements for millions of objects. However, the success of this thesis will not depend on the implementation of J-PAS, since the tools can be tested on simulated data.