Abstract Details
| Name: Koshy George Affiliation: Indian institute of Astrophysics Conference ID: ASI2017_1129 Title : Galaxies reborn: The curious case of star forming elliptical galaxies Authors and Co-Authors : Abstract Type : Oral Abstract Category : Extragalactic astronomy Abstract : Elliptical galaxies in the local Universe are understood to be passively evolving "red and dead" stellar systems that formed from a burst of star formation when the Universe was less than half of its current age. This classic notion got changed with the recent observations of stellar mass growth and size evolution of elliptical galaxies over the past ~ 8 billion year. We now have a class of blue star forming elliptical galaxies which on contrary to the star forming spiral galaxies retain the elliptical morphology. We report here the structural study on 55 blue star forming elliptical galaxies where we found that a majority of these systems show signature of recent interaction while retaining the elliptical morphology and follow elliptical galaxy scaling relations. The star forming population of elliptical galaxies at low redshifts could be normal ellipticals that might have undergone a recent gas rich minor merger event. The star formation in these galaxies will shut down once the recently acquired fuel is consumed following which the galaxy evolve to a normal elliptical galaxy. |