Misaligned gas accretion as a formation pathway of S0 galaxies

First author: Yuren Zhou

We select 753 S0 galaxies from the internal Product Lauch-10 of MaNGA survey (MPL-10) and find that $\sim$11% of S0 galaxies show gas-star kinematic misalignments, which is higher than the misaligned fraction in spiral ($\sim$1%) and elliptical galaxies ($\sim$6%) in MPL-10. If we only consider the emission-line galaxies (401 emission-line S0s), the misaligned fraction in S0s increases to $\sim$20%. In S0s, the kinematic misalignments are more common than the merger remnant features ($\sim$8%). Misaligned S0s have lower masses of stellar components and dark matter halos than S0s with merger remnant features. Based on the $NUV-r$ versus $M_*$ diagram, we split galaxies into three populations: blue cloud (BC), green valley (GV) and red sequence, finding that BC and GV misaligned S0s have positive $\mathrm{D}_n4000$ radial gradients which indicates younger stellar population in the central region than the outskirts. Through comparing the misaligned S0s with a control sample for the whole S0 galaxy sample, we find that the BC and GV misaligned S0s show younger stellar population at $R\lesssim R_e$ and older population at $R\gtrsim R_e$ than the control samples. Considering the high incidence of kinematic misalignments in S0 galaxies and the properties of environments and stellar populations, we propose misaligned gas accretion as an important formation pathway for S0s.


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