Scaling relations in early-type galaxies from integral-field stellar kinematics

Abstract

Early-type galaxies (ETGs) satisfy a now classic scaling relation R e ∝ σ 1.2 e I −0.8 e , the Fundamental Plane (FP; Djorgovski & Davis 1987; Dressler et al . 1987), between their size, stellar velocity dispersion and mean surface brightness. A significant effort has been devoted in the past twenty years to try to understand why the coefficients of the relation are not the ones predicted by the virial theorem R e ∝ σ 2 e I −1 e .