Morphological Decomposition of the Early-type Spiral Galaxy M81 (NGC 3031)

This paper presents a morphological investigation of the early-type spiral galaxy M81 (NGC 3031) through decomposition by fitting radial profiles of surface brightness using the software GALFIT, aimed at exploring structural components of M81 and quantifying their morphology. In this work, we adopt 6 types of decompositions with different numbers of morphological components, among which the most complicated one contains 5 components such as a bulge, a disk, a pair of outer spiral arms, a pair of inner spiral arms, and a galactic nucleus. The results show that, M81 hosts a classical bulge with the Sérsic index $\sim$ 5.0; the morphology and the luminosity for the bulge are almost constant in the different decomposition types. The disk of M81 has the Sérsic index $\sim$ 1.2 but the morphology and the luminosity are found sensitive to the inclusion of the inner spiral arms in the decomposition or not. The results of this work indicate that the combination of individual substructures has a considerable impact on the morphology of the galaxy as a mixture. On the basis of the results, the usability of the different types of decomposition is suggested in this work. The three-component decomposition, i.e., bulge + disk + nucleus, is applicable to statistics of large samples of galaxies; more complicated decomposition with spiral arms taken into account is suitable for precise measurements of individual galaxies in small samples. This work is based on the single-band Spitzer-The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) 4.5 $\mu$m image. In the future, we will carry out multi-wavelength decomposition, for the purpose of investigating spectral energy distributions and stellar population properties for the galactic substructures, and thereby deduce their formation history and evolution processes.