Mass-to-light ratios in elliptical galaxies

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Abstract
We have obtained medium-resolution infrared CVF spectra of the 2.3-μm CO absorption feature sensitive to stellar luminosity class in a sample of elliptical galaxies and standard stars. These are the highest quality spectra of this feature published and have the potential of determining relative numbers of late-type giants and cool main-sequence dwarfs in elliptical galaxies more accurately than previous narrow-band filter measurements. We introduce a synthesis technique based on data on Baade's window and investigate the limits on numbers of low-mass stars. Systematic uncertainties in the synthesis are introduced by inadequate knowledge about Baade's window while the main statistical uncertainty is due to the large errors on published broadband colours of elliptical galaxies. We note that synthesis based on a narrow-band filter CO index suffers from uncertain K corrections and difficulties with the continuum determination. Resulting mass-to-light ratios are 2.5 ≦ M/L⊙bol ≦ 5.0.

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