%0 Journal Article
%A Muñoz Mateos, J. C.
%A Boissier, S.
%A Gil De Paz, Armando
%A Zamorano Calvo, Jaime
%A Kennicutt, R. C., Jr.
%A Moustakas, J.
%A Prantzos, N.
%A Gallego Maestro, Jesús
%T Radial distribution of stars, gas, and dust in sings galaxies. III. Modeling the evolution of the stellar component in galaxy disks
%D 2011
%@ 0004-637X
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/44778
%X We analyze the evolution of 42 spiral galaxies in the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey. We make use of ultraviolet (UV), optical, and near-infrared radial profiles, corrected for internal extinction using the total-infrared to UV ratio, to probe the emission of stellar populations of different ages as a function of galactocentric distance. We fit these radial profiles with models that describe the chemical and spectro-photometric evolution of spiral disks within a self-consistent framework. These backward evolutionary models successfully reproduce the multi-wavelength profiles of our galaxies, except for the UV profiles of some early-type disks for which the models seem to retain too much gas. From the model fitting we infer the maximum circular velocity of the rotation curve V_C and the dimensionless spin parameter λ. The values of V_C are in good agreement with the velocities measured in H I rotation curves. Even though our sample is not volume limited, the resulting distribution of λ is close to the lognormal function obtained in cosmological N-body simulations, peaking at λ ∼0.03 regardless of the total halo mass. We do not find any evident trend between λ and Hubble type, besides an increase in the scatter for the latest types. According to the model, galaxies evolve along a roughly constant mass-size relation, increasing their scale lengths as they become more massive. The radial scale length of most disks in our sample seems to have increased at a rate of 0.05-0.06 kpc Gyr^-1, although the same cannot be said of a volume-limited sample. In relative terms, the scale length has grown by 20%-25% since z = 1 and, unlike the former figure, we argue that this relative growth rate can be indeed representative of a complete galaxy sample.
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