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Description
Disentangling processes governing the formation and evolution of galaxies is a fundamental challenge in extragalactic research. In this sense the current belief that galaxies grow by the action of minor mergers makes the study of the stellar mass-size relation in different environments an important tool for distinguishing effects of internal and external processes. The aim of this work is to study the effects of environment on the growth in size of galaxies. As part of AMIGA project (Analysis of the Interstellar Medium of Isolated GAlaxies), we examine the stellar mass-size relation for a sample of the most isolated galaxies in the local Universe interpreted as stellar systems where evolution has been mainly governed by internal processes. Effects of environment on the stellar mass-size relation are evaluated by comparing our results with samples of less isolated early- and late-type galaxies, as well as, for the first time, different spiral subtypes. Stellar masses in our sample were derived by fitting the SED of each galaxy with kcorrect. We used two different size estimators, the half-light radius obtained with SExtractor and the effective radius calculated by fitting a Sersic profile to the i-band image of each galaxy using GALFIT.We found good agreement between those size estimators when the Sersic index fell in the range 2.5<n<4.5 and 0.5<n<2.5 for (visually classified) early- and late-type galaxies respectively.
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