Colour gradients of low-redshift galaxies in the DESI Legacy Imaging Survey

Abstract

Radial colour gradients within galaxies arise from gradients of stellar age, metallicity, and dust reddening. Large samples of colour gradients from wide-area imaging surveys can be used to constrain galaxy formation models. Here we measured colour gradients for low-redshift galaxies using photometry from the 9th DESI Legacy Imaging Survey (LS), which reaches r ∼ 24 over ∼14,000 deg2. We investigate empirical relationships between colour gradients, M*, and sSFR. We compared our results with the prediction of the Illustris TNG-100 simulation using SDSS mock images.