Length and Thickness of Edge-on Disks in COSMOS: Measures of Galaxy Assembly
Authors/Creators
- 1. South African Astronomical Observatory , Dept. of Astronomy, University of Cape Town
Description
We present the disk size and thickness of 18 Milky Way-mass edge-on galaxies at intermediate redshift and compare them to the Galaxy's values. We use public COSMOS field data taken by HST's Advanced Camera for Surveys(ACS)/Wide Field Channel(WFC). The instrument's spatial resolution of 0.05′′ pixel-1allows us to resolve physical scales of 0.3 kpc out to z~0.48, and 0.6 kpc out to z~1.6 comparable to the MW's thin and thick disk scale-heights, respectively. We select our sample from the COSMOS2015 photometric catalog (Laigle et al., 2016) that provides reliable photometric measurements. We fit standard models to the radial and vertical light profiles of galaxies in our sample and measure their scale-heights and scale-lengths. We obtain preliminary results of a mean dust scaleheight of 0.4 ± 0.2 kpc for our sample. With high resolution near-infrared data to be taken by Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Imager, we can be able to probe this attenuated layer and characterize the young, star-forming disk components.