Vertical structure of stellar populations in galaxy disks

Stellar populations are most useful for disentangling formation and evolution histories of galaxies. We present here results obtained using data from the GHOSTS survey ((Radburn-Smith et al., 2011) which uses HST photometry to resolve stellar populations in nearby massive disk galaxies. Using color magnitude diagrams we can distingiush stellar populations of different ages and analyse the spatial structure of each population seperately. We have examined the vertical disk structure in six edge-on galaxies. We find a general heating of disk, i.e. larger scaleheights for older populations. The scaleheight of each population is constant over most of radial extent of each galaxy. In massive galaxies (Vrot > 150 km/s) we clearly see a thick component (i.e. there are more stars at large distances from the plane than expected from a single disk model). These thick components consist of intermediate-aged and old stars (>1 Gyr), and the (thick) scaleheight of the old population (>4 Gyr) is significantly larger than the (thick) scaleheight of the intermediate aged (1-2 Gyr) population. This finding argues against a rapid formation of the thick components and favors a more secular formation of these components.