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ABSTRACT Using the final Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory sample of 10K galaxies, we investigate the dark matter (DM) fraction fDM within one half-light radius Re for about 6K galaxies with good kinematics spanning a wide range of morphologies and stellar velocity dispersion. We employ two techniques to estimate fDM: (i) Jeans anisotropic modelling (JAM), which performs DM decomposition based on stellar kinematics and (ii) comparing the total dynamical mass-to-light ratios (M/L) JAM and (M*/L) SPS from stellar population synthesis (SPS). We find that both methods consistently show a significant trend of increasing fDM with decreasing σe and low fDM at larger σe. For 235 early-type galaxies with the best models, we explore the variation of stellar initial mass function (IMF) by comparing the stellar mass-to-light ratios from JAM and SPS. We confirm that the stellar mass excess factor αIMF increases with σe, consistent with previous studies that reported a transition from Chabrier-like to Salpeter IMF among galaxies. We show that the αIMF trend cannot be driven by M*/L or IMF gradients as it persists when allowing for radial gradients in our model. We find no evidence for the total M/L increasing toward the centre. We detect weak positive correlations between αIMF and age, but no correlations with metallicity. We stack galaxy spectra according to their αIMF to search for differences in IMF-sensitive spectral features (e. g. the Na ₈ doublet). We only find marginal evidence for such differences, which casts doubt on the validity of one or both methods to measure the IMF.
Lu et al. (2024) studied this question.