Despite the considerable scatter in both colors and color gradients (Peletier & Balcells 1996; Taylor et al. 2005; Roediger et al. 2011a), the tight correlation between color and stellar mass of the host galaxies holds true in both the region identified as intermediate and outer in Sect. 7. ETGs form a tight red sequence (see Fig. 10) for both regions and show an average inside-out gradient of ~0.1 mag (Fig. 12, bottom). LTGs form instead two different distributions: the blue cloud of the intermediate (or bulge/bar) region becomes red (i.e., it reaches the red sequences) above 1010 M⊙ while the outer, disk-dominated region never overlaps completely the red sequence. Still, more massive disks are redder than their lower mass counterparts but the difference between the colors of the outer and the intermediate region increases with respect to the total stellar mass. This can be possibly induced by the growth of a red and dead structure in the center of massive disks, i.e. that the central part of galaxies underwent a star formation quenching process that turned them red. Our results on the average properties of color profiles broadly agree with literature data. For example MacArthur et al. (2004) have shown that the radial profile of the average ages of the stellar populations decreases from inside out and that the steepness of the decrease is a function of morphological type. Color templates shown in Fig. 9 exhibit a radial behavior fully consistent with the average age profiles shown by MacArthur et al. (2004). We find there is also a good agreement with the (g−H) color profiles published in Roediger et al. (2011a) for almost all the morphological types, although in their median profiles of early disks they find positive color gradients (and consistently positive age population gradients in their stellar population analysis, Roediger et al. 2011b) that we do not see. Roediger et al. (2011b) do not find any direct link between galaxy morphologies and the observed stellar population gradients. On the contrary, studies such as Cheung et al. (2013) and Gavazzi et al. (2015) have shown that the bar occupation fraction rises steeply above 109.5 M⊙ (as also confirmed by the works done by  Skibba et al. 2012; Masters et al. 2012) and that, above this mass,galaxies are progressively more quenched (red) in their centers, while their disks still sustain SF and hence are blue. These studies therefore highlight that the presence of structures such as bars can indeed produce the color gradients that we observe and likely also the stellar population gradients. These authors thus conclude that a secular bar drives the quenching of the star formation in the central kiloparsecs of galaxies. Moreover massive galaxies undergo bar instability earlier than their lower mass counterparts and thus have more time to grow redder than low mass systems. Moreover, Méndez-Abreu et al. (2012) on a study of the Virgo bar fraction have shown that this rises up to more than 50% above 1010 M⊙, adding a further link between color/stellar populations radial gradients that we observe and structures such as bars (Laurikainen et al. 2010). We stress, however, that disk instabilities can also rejuvinate the central stellar population by, e.g., triggering central star formation in correspondence of the ILRs of spirals or bars (an example could be the one of VCC 508 in Fig. 3a).
Citation: Roediger et al. 2011a
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