A strong dichotomy in S0 disk profiles between the virgo cluster and the field

Abstract

We report evidence for a striking difference between S0 galaxies in the local field and the Virgo Cluster. While field S0 galaxies have disks whose surface-brightness profiles are roughly equally divided between the three main types (Types I, II, and III: single-exponential, truncated, and antitruncated), Virgo S0s appear to be entirely lacking in disk truncations. More specifically, the fraction of truncations in S0 galaxies with MB < -17 is 28+7-6% for the field versus 0+4- 0% for the Virgo Cluster galaxies; the difference is significant at the 99.7% level. The discrepancy is made up almost entirely by TypeI profiles, which are almost twice as frequent in the Virgo Cluster as they are in the field. This suggests that S0 formation may be driven by different processes in cluster and field environments, and that outer-disk effects can be useful tests of S0 formation models. © 2012. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.