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Evidence For Merger Remnants In Early-Type Host Galaxies Of Low-Redshift Qsos, Nicola Bennert, Gabriela Canalizo, Bruno Jungwiert, Alan Stockton, François Schweizer, Chien Y. Peng, Mark Lacy
Evidence For Merger Remnants In Early-Type Host Galaxies Of Low-Redshift Qsos, Nicola Bennert, Gabriela Canalizo, Bruno Jungwiert, Alan Stockton, François Schweizer, Chien Y. Peng, Mark Lacy
Physics
We present results from a pilot HST ACS deep imaging study in broadband V of five low-redshift QSO host galaxies classified in the literature as ellipticals. The aim of our study is to determine whether these early-type hosts formed at high redshift and have since evolved passively, or whether they have undergone relatively recent mergers that may be related to the triggering of the nuclear activity. We perform two-dimensional modeling of the light distributions to analyze the host galaxies' morphology. We find that, while each host galaxy is reasonably well fitted by a de Vaucouleurs profile, the majority of them …