We select a large volume-limited sample of low surface brightness galax- ies (LSBGs, 2021) to investigate in detail their statistical properties and their dif- ferences from high surface brightness galaxies (HSBGs, 3639). The distributions of stellar masses of LSBGs and HSBGs are nearly the same and they have the same me- dian values. Thus this volume-limited sample has good completeness and is further removed from the effect of stellar masses on their other properties when we compare LSBGs to HSBGs. We found that LSBGs tend to have lower stellar metallicities and lower effective dust attenuations, indicating that they have lower dust than HSBGs. The LSBGs have relatively higher stellar mass-to-light ratios, higher gas fractions, lower star forming rates (SFRs), and lower specific SFRs than HSBGs. Moreover, with the decreasing surface brightness, gas fraction increases, but the SFRs and spe- cific SFRs decrease rapidly for the sample galaxies. This could mean that the star formation histories between LSBGs and HSBGs are different, and HSBGs may have stronger star forming activities than LSBGs.
Guo-Hu ZhongYan-Chun LiangFeng-Shan LiuFrancois HammerKaren DisseauLi-Cai Deng
A number of spectroscopic surveys have been carried out or are planned to study the origin of the Milky Way. Their exploitation requires reliable automated methods and softwares to measure the fundamental parameters of the stars. Adopting the ULySS package, we have tested the effect of different resolutions and signal-to- noise ratios (SNR) on the measurement of the stellar atmospheric parameters (effective temperature Teff, surface gravity log g, and metaUicity [Fe/H]). We show that ULySS is reliable for determining these parameters with medium-resolution spectra (R ~2000). Then, we applied the method to measure the parameters of 771 stars selected in the commissioning database of the Guoshoujing Telescope (LAMOST). The results were compared with the SDSS/SEGUE Stellar Parameter Pipeline (SSPP), and we derived precisions of 167 K, 0.34dex, and 0.16dex for Teff, logg and [Fe/H] respectively. Furthermore, 120 of these stars are selected to construct the primary stellar spectral template library (Version 1.0) of LAMOST, and will be deployed as basic ingredients for the LAMOST automated parametrization pipeline.
We study the ages of a large sample (1802) of nearly face-on disk low surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs) using the evolutionary population synthesis (EPS) model PEGASE with an exponentially decreasing star formation rate to fit their mul- tiwavelength spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from far-ultraviolet (FUV) to nearinfrared (NIR). The derived ages of LSBGs are 1-5 Gyr for most of the sample no matter if constant or varying dust extinction is adopted, which are similar to most of the previous studies on smaller samples. This means that these LSBGs formed the majority of their stars quite recently. However, a small part of the sample (~2%-3%) has larger ages of 5-8 Gyr, meaning their major star forming process may have occurred earlier. At the same time, a large sample (5886) of high surface brightness galaxies (HSBGs) are selected and studied using the same method for comparisons. The de- rived ages are 1-5 Gyr for most of the sample (97%) as well. These results probably mean that these LSBGs have not much different star formation histories from their HSBGs counterparts. However, we should notice that the HSBGs are generally about 0.2 Gyr younger, which could mean that the HSBGs may have undergone more recent star forming activities than the LSBGs.