What's going on with those pesky E+A's?

E+A galaxy: post-starburst system -- lots of A stars, no emission:

(from Zabludoff etal 1996)



 
 

Zabludoff etal (1996) showed they exist in field and cluster environments, and isolated a sample of extreme objects:

 
 
We (Zabludoff etal 2000 in prep) have undertaken a HST imaging survey of the 5 most extreme objects.

Four of them are morphologically what we expect...

 
 
But EA1 is a head-scratcher.
  • MHI ~ 4x109 Msun (Chang etal 2000)
  • SFR(1.4 Ghz) < 0.6 Msun/yr (Chang etal 2000)
  • field environment
A young merger with a poststarburst spectrum?!?!