Abstract
We have undertaken bidimensional spectroscopy of the central part of the nearby lenticular galaxy NGC 7280 with the Multi-Pupil Fiber Spectrograph of the 6 m telescope of the Special Astrophysical Observatory. We find a rather young stellar nucleus, with a mean population age of 1.5 ± 0.5 Gyr, which is more metal-rich than the bulge at R ≈ 1 kpc by an order of magnitude. The chemically and age-decoupled nucleus seems to be spatially resolved: the circumnuclear absorption index isolines represent ellipses elongated in P.A. ≈ 100°–110°. The same orientation, P.A. = 103°, is found for the elongated circumnuclear stellar structure, revealed from the morphological analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFPC2 and NICMOS images of NGC 7280 and seen best of all at R = 1''. Taking into account the stellar kinematics inside R ≈ 2'', we conclude that this structure is a circumnuclear stellar disk inclined with respect to the global plane of the galaxy. Meanwhile, both photometric and kinematical data in the radius range 2''–8'' imply the existence of an intermediate-scale bar elongated in P.A. ≈ 60°. The circumnuclear ionized gas is distributed and rotates in the plane orthogonal to the plane of the circumnuclear stellar disk.
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