Massive Disks in Low Surface Brightness Galaxies

Abstract

An update of the set of low surface brightness galaxies is presented which can be used to set constraints on the otherwise ambiguous decompositions of their rotation curves into contributions due to the various components of the galaxies. The selected galaxies show all clear spiral structure and arguments of density wave theory of galactic spiral arms are used to estimate the masses of the galactic disks. Again these estimates seem to indicate that the disks of low surface brightness galaxies might be much more massive than currently thought. This puzzling result contradicts stellar population synthesis models. This would mean also that low surface brightness galaxies are not dominated by dark matter in their inner parts.

LaTex, 4 pages, 1 figure, to appear in: The Evolution of Galaxies. III-From simple Approaches to Self-Consistent Models, G. Hensler, G. Stasinska, S. Harfst, P. Kroupa, Chr. Theis (eds.), Kluwer