THE MASSIVE SURVEY. I. A VOLUME-LIMITED INTEGRAL-FIELD SPECTROSCOPIC STUDY OF THE MOST MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES WITHIN 108 Mpc

Abstract

Massive early-type galaxies represent the modern day remnants of the earliest major star formation episodes in the history of the universe. These galaxies are central to our understanding of the evolution of cosmic structure, stellar populations, and supermassive black holes, but the details of their complex formation histories remain uncertain. To address this situation, we have initiated the MASSIVE Survey, a volume-limited, multi-wavelength, integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) and photometric survey of the structure and dynamics of the ∼100 most massive early-type galaxies within a distance of 108 Mpc. This survey probes a stellar mass range M * 10 11.5 M and diverse galaxy environments that have not been systematically studied to date. Our wide-field IFS data cover about two effective radii of individual galaxies, and for a subset of them, we are acquiring additional IFS observations on sub-arcsecond scales with adaptive optics. We are also acquiring deep K-band imaging to trace the extended halos of the galaxies and measure accurate total magnitudes. Dynamical orbit modeling of the combined data will allow us to simultaneously determine the stellar, black hole, and dark matter halo masses. The primary goals of the project are to constrain the black hole scaling relations at high masses, investigate systematically the stellar initial mass function and dark matter distribution in massive galaxies, and probe the late-time assembly of ellipticals through stellar population and kinematical gradients. In this paper, we describe the MASSIVE sample selection, discuss the distinct demographics and structural and environmental properties of the selected galaxies, and provide an overview of our basic observational program, science goals and early survey results.

The accretion histories of brightest cluster galaxies from their stellar population gradients

“…The SAMI galaxy survey (Fogarty et al 2014; Allen & the SAMI Galaxy Survey Team 2014) currently underway will allow us to achieve this goal. New ultra wide-field IFU spectrographs such as MUSE on the Very Large Telescope and large date sets as the MASSIVE survey (Ma et al 2014) will also allow us to determine whether the picture is different at radii beyond 1 Re.…”

The Massive Survey. Iv. The X-Ray Halos of the Most Massive Early-Type Galaxies in the Nearby Universe

“…The selection and sample properties are described in detail in Ma et al (2014); we summarize salient details here for completeness. To emulate a stellar-mass selection, we select galaxies from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) Redshift Survey (2MRS; Huchra et al 2012) that are brighter than a total K-band magnitude limit of…”

“…,2MASS 10 ,SDSS (Ma et al 2014, their Equation (4)), where R e,2MASS is the median effective radius measured from the JHK-band 2MASS imaging. 7…”

“…The second (larger) extraction region follows the more typical methodology for analyzing diffuse X-ray emission. We extract all of the X-ray photons out to where the diffuse component becomes equal to the background emission K mag, which was used to define the initial MASSIVE sample selection presented in Ma et al (2014). As a comparison, the ATLAS 3D galaxy sample is shown with gray triangles.…”

“…However, due in part to the limited volume, the ATLAS 3D sample contains few slowrotating systems with available high-resolution X-ray data, and virtually no galaxies with stellar masses above  * > M M 10 11 . Complementary to these previous multiwavelength studies, here we focus our study on the hot-gas emission present in the volume-limited MASSIVE survey (Ma et al 2014; M14 hereafter) of the 116 most massive early-type galaxies within 108 Mpc. Similar to ATLAS 3D , MASSIVE uses integral field spectroscopy (IFS) combined with uniform K-band imaging to study the stellar populations (Greene et al 2015) and stellar kinematics (M. Veale et al 2016, in preparation) of the MASSIVE galaxies.…”