Characterizing the built-up of extended halos with planetary nebulae

ENNIS, ANA INÉS; JOHANNA HARTKE; FUYAN BIAN

Congreso; 63 Reunión Anual de la Asociación Argentina de Astronomía; 2021

Planetary nebulae are widely used as tracers of the extended halos of galaxies, since their bright emission lines make it easy to characterize them at large distances. The slope of their luminosity function has been shown to vary with the age and metallicity of the underlying stellar populations, while their specific frequency shows significant changes in the transition from halo to intra-cluster or intra-group light. These empirical relations are not properly understood yet, and detecting more planetary nebulae in the central regions of galaxies, where classical detection techniques are blind, is key to improving our understanding of these variations. We present preliminary results for the pilot galaxy of a project which consists of the analysis of MUSE data of the centres of a sample of early-type galaxies, where the use of integral-field spectroscopy allows us to decompose the stellar and nebular contributions despite the brightness of the region.