AAS 199th meeting, Washington, DC, January 2002
Session 52. Structure and Kinematics of Spiral Galaxies
Display, Tuesday, January 8, 2002, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall

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[52.01] Intermediate-band Surface Photometry of the Edge-on Galaxy: NGC 4565

D. Burstein (ASU), H. Wu (NAOC, Beijing, China), R.A. Windhorst (ASU), X. Zhou, J.S. Chen (NAOC), Beijing-Arizona-Taipei-Connecticut (BATC) Collaboration

We analyze a new, 42.79 hr image of the nearby, edge-on galaxy NGC 4565 in the Beijing-Arizona-Taipei-Connecticut (BATC) 6660Åband using the large-format CCD system on the 0.6m Schmidt telescope at the Xinglong Station of the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC). With a zero point accuracy of 0.02 mag, we can measure galaxy surface brightness to an accuracy of 0.25 mag at a surface brightness at 27.5 mag arcsec-2 at 6660Å, corresponding to a distance of 22 kpc from the center of the disk of NGC 4565. The integrated magnitude of NGC 4565 in our filter is m6660 = 8.99 (R = 9.1) to a surface brightness of 28 mag arcsec-2. We analyze the faint outer parts of this galaxy using a two-dimensional model comprised of three components: an exponential thin disk, an exponential thick disk, and a power-law halo. Combined with a need to provide a cut-off radius for the disk, a total of 12 parameters are included in our model, for which their best values are determined via a Monte Carlo method. The thin disk and thick disk parameters we determine for NGC 4565 are consistent with those of previous studies. However, we constrain the power law slope of its halo to be between r-3.2 and r-4.0, with a best fit value of r-3.88. We find the axis ratio of the halo to be 0.44 and its core radius to be 14.4 kpc (for an adopted distance of 14.5 Mpc). We also agree with others that the bulge of NGC 4565 is fit well by an exponential luminosity distribution with scale height similar to that found for the thin disk.


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