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Combined gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics analysis of early type galaxies

(2009) Barnabè, Matteo

Understanding the formation and evolution processes of elliptical galaxies remains among the most important unsolved problems in present-day astrophysics and cosmology. A reliable and detailed description of the mass-density profile and structural properties of ellipticals through cosmic time is a much-needed step forward but, whereas nearby ellipticals have been thoroughly analyzed, painfully little is known about more distant (and therefore younger) systems, since observational limitations determine degeneracies in the traditional diagnostic tools.
In my PhD Thesis I have developed a novel method to overcome these difficulties and disentangle these degeneracies by combining, for the first time, in a fully self-consistent way the information obtained from two independent and complementary techniques: gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics. This method provides an effective way to conduct detailed studies of elliptical galaxies beyond the local Universe.
I have applied this method to the analysis of a sample of distant lens-galaxies up to a look-back time of almost 4 billion years, for which high-resolution data obtained with both Hubble Space Telescope and the 8.2-meter Very Large Telescope are available. The main results of this research are: (1) very distant elliptical are similar to their nearby counterparts in terms of dynamical structure and total density profile, indicating little evolution during the last quarter of the history of the Universe; (2) the dark matter fraction in the inner regions is about 15-30%; (3) ellipticals display a striking degree of regularity and smoothness in their mass distribution.

	Title and contents
	Chapter 1
	Chapter 2
	Chapter 3
	Chapter 4
	Chapter 5
	Chapter 6
	Chapter 7
	Bibliography
	Samenvatting
	Compendio della tesi
	Acknowledgments
	Complete thesis