Global regularities in integrated galaxy spectra

Abstract

We have investigated some statistical properties of integrated spectra of galaxies from Kennicutt (1992a) spectrophotometric atlas. The input for the analysis are galaxy spectra sampled in 1300 bins between 3750 Å~ and 6500 Å. We make use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyse the 1300-dimensional space spanned by the spectra. Their projection onto the plane defined by the first two principal components, the principal plane, shows that normal galaxies are in a quasi-linear sequence that we call spectral sequence. We show that the spectral sequence is closely related to the Hubble morphological sequence. These results are robust in the sense that the reality of the spectral sequence does not depend on data normalization. The existence of this sequence suggests that a single parameter may describe the spectrum of normal galaxies. We have investigated this hypothesis with Bruzual & Charlot (1995) models of spectral evolution. We show that, for single age models (15 Gyr), the spectral sequence can be parametrized by the characteristic star formation time-scales of the different morphological types. By examining the projection of evolutionary tracks of normal galaxies onto the principal plane, we verify that the spectral sequence is also an evolutive sequence, with galaxy spectra evolving from later to earlier spectral types. Considering the close correspondence between the spectral and morphological sequences, this lead us to speculate that galaxies may evolve morphologically along the Hubble sequence, from Sm/Im to E.