The Coexistence of Classical Bulges, Pseudobulges, and Supermassive Black Holes

Some S0 and early-type spiral galaxies possess "composite bulges"; in these galaxies, the photometric bulge -- the central stellar light in excess of the disk light -- is composed of both a "(disky) pseudobulge", with a flattened, disklike morphology and relatively cool stellar kinematics, and a rounder, kinematically hot "classical bulge" embedded within. I speculate that supermassive black holes (SMBH) in such galaxies may correlate with the classical-bulge component only, and not with the pseudobulge component; preliminary comparisons with SMBH masses appear to support this hypothesis.Comment: LaTeX, 4 pages, 2 PDF figures. To appear in the proceedings of "The Monster's Fiery Breath: Feedback in Galaxies, Groups, and Clusters", eds. Sebastian Heinz and Eric Wilcots (AIP conference series

Imfit: A Fast, Flexible New Program for Astronomical Image Fitting

I describe a new, open-source astronomical image-fitting program called Imfit, specialized for galaxies but potentially useful for other sources, which is fast, flexible, and highly extensible. A key characteristic of the program is an object-oriented design which allows new types of image components (2D surface-brightness functions) to be easily written and added to the program. Image functions provided with Imfit include the usual suspects for galaxy decompositions (Sersic, exponential, Gaussian), along with Core-Sersic and broken-exponential profiles, elliptical rings, and three components which perform line-of-sight integration through 3D luminosity-density models of disks and rings seen at arbitrary inclinations. Available minimization algorithms include Levenberg-Marquardt, Nelder-Mead simplex, and Differential Evolution, allowing trade-offs between speed and decreased sensitivity to local minima in the fit landscape. Minimization can be done using the standard chi^2 statistic (using either data or model values to estimate per-pixel Gaussian errors, or else user-supplied error images) or Poisson-based maximum-likelihood statistics; the latter approach is particularly appropriate for cases of Poisson data in the low-count regime. I show that fitting low-S/N galaxy images using chi^2 minimization and individual-pixel Gaussian uncertainties can lead to significant biases in fitted parameter values, which are avoided if a Poisson-based statistic is used; this is true even when Gaussian read noise is present.Comment: pdflatex, 27 pages, 19 figures. Revised version, accepted by ApJ. Programs, source code, and documentation available at: http://www.mpe.mpg.de/~erwin/code/imfit

The Dependence of Bar Frequency on Galaxy Mass, Colour, and Gas Content -- and Angular Resolution -- in the Local Universe

I use distance- and mass-limited subsamples of the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G) to investigate how the presence of bars in spiral galaxies depends on mass, colour, and gas content and whether large, SDSS-based investigations of bar frequencies agree with local data. Bar frequency reaches a maximum of $\approx 0.70$ at $M_{\star} \sim 10^{9.7} M_{\odot}$, declining to both lower and higher masses. It is roughly constant over a wide range of colours ($g - r \approx 0.1$-0.8) and atomic gas fractions ($\log (M_{HI} / M_{\star}) \approx -2.5$ to 1). Bars are thus as common in blue, gas-rich galaxies are they are in red, gas-poor galaxies. This is in sharp contrast to many SDSS-based studies of $z \sim 0.01$-0.1 galaxies, which report f_bar increasing strongly to higher masses (from $M_{\star} \sim 10^{10}$ to $10^{11} M_{\odot}$), redder colours, and lower gas fractions. The contradiction can be explained if SDSS-based studies preferentially miss bars in, and underestimate the bar fraction for, lower-mass (bluer, gas-rich) galaxies due to poor spatial resolution and the correlation between bar size and stellar mass. Simulations of SDSS-style observations using the S4G galaxies as a parent sample, and assuming that bars below a threshold angular size of twice the PSF FWHM cannot be identified, successfully reproduce typical SDSS f_bar trends for stellar mass and gas mass ratio. Similar considerations may affect high-redshift studies, especially if bars grow in length over cosmic time; simulations suggest that high-redshift bar fractions may thus be systematically underestimated.Comment: pdflatex, 19 pages (+ appendix), 16 figures; revised and corrected version, to appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Data, code, and Jupyter notebooks available at https://github.com/perwin/s4g_barfraction

Asymptotic behavior and zero distribution of Carleman orthogonal polynomials

Let $L$ be an analytic Jordan curve and let $\{p_n(z)\}_{n=0}^\infty$ be the sequence of polynomials that are orthonormal with respect to the area measure over the interior of $L$. A well-known result of Carleman states that \label{eq12} \lim_{n\to\infty}\frac{p_n(z)}{\sqrt{(n+1)/\pi} [\phi(z)]^{n}}= \phi'(z) locally uniformly on certain open neighborhood of the closed exterior of $L$, where $\phi$ is the canonical conformal map of the exterior of $L$ onto the exterior of the unit circle. In this paper we extend the validity of (\ref{eq12}) to a maximal open set, every boundary point of which is an accumulation point of the zeros of the $p_n$'s. Some consequences on the limiting distribution of the zeros are discussed, and the results are illustrated with two concrete examples and numerical computations.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure