| Kinematic and chemical constraints on the formation of M31's inner and outer halo (2008) | |||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||
| The halo of M31 shows a wealth of substructures, some of which are consistent with assembly from satellite accretion. Here we report on kinematic and abundance results from Keck DEIMOS spectroscopy in the near-infrared calcium triplet region of over 3500 red giant star candidates along the minor axis and in off-axis spheroid fields of M31. These data reach out to large radial distances of about 160 kpc. The derived radial velocity distributions show an indication of a kinematically cold substructure around ~17 kpc, which has been reported before. We devise a new and improved method to measure spectroscopic metallicities from the calcium triplet in low signal-to-noise ratio spectra using a weighted co-addition of the individual lines. The resulting distribution (accurate to ~0.3 dex down to signal-to-noise ratios of 5) leads us to note an even stronger gradient in the abundance distribution along M31's minor axis and in particular toward the outer halo fields than previously detected. The mean metallicity in the outer fields reaches below -2 dex, with individual values as low as | |||||||||||
Details der Publikation | |||||||||||
| |||||||||||