RT Journal Article T1 Early-type galaxies with tidal debris and their scaling relations in the Spitzer survey of stellar structure in galaxies (S^(4)G) A1 Gil De Paz, Armando AB Tidal debris around galaxies can yield important clues on their evolution. We have identified tidal debris in 11 early-type galaxies (T ≤ 0) from a sample of 65 early types drawn from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S^4G). The tidal debris includes features such as shells, ripples, and tidal tails. A variety of techniques, including two-dimensional decomposition of galactic structures, were used to quantify the residual tidal features. The tidal debris contributes ~3%-10% to the total 3.6 μm luminosity of the host galaxy. Structural parameters of the galaxies were estimated using two-dimensional profile fitting. We investigate the locations of galaxies with tidal debris in the fundamental plane and Kormendy relation. We find that galaxies with tidal debris lie within the scatter of early-type galaxies without tidal features. Assuming that the tidal debris is indicative of recent gravitational interaction or merger, this suggests that these galaxies have either undergone minor merging events so that the overall structural properties of the galaxies are not significantly altered, or they have undergone a major merging events but already have experienced sufficient relaxation and phase mixing so that their structural properties become similar to those of the non-interacting early-type galaxies. PB American Astronomical Society SN 0004-637X YR 2012 FD 2012-07-01 LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/44851 UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/44851 LA eng NO © 2012. The American Astronomical Society. All right reserved. Artículo firmado por 24 autores. T.K., K.S., J.-C.M.-M., and T.M. acknowledge support from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. M.G.L. was supported in part by Mid-career Research Program through the NRF grant funded by the MEST (No. 2010-0013875). This work was co-funded under the Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission (FP7-COFUND). E.A. and A.B. thank the Centre National d'Etudes for support.This research is based on observations and archival data made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, and made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which are operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). We acknowledge the usage of the HyperLeda database (http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr). NO Unión Europea. FP7 NO National Radio Astronomy Observatory NO NRF NO MEST NO European Commission NO Centre National d'Etudes NO National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) NO Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission (FP7-COFUND) DS Docta Complutense RD 8 abr 2025