2 T. Peterken et al.

2013), most are restricted to the highest mass galaxies, so understand how this well-defined galaxy class have evolved
this picture of inside-out growth is normally limited to early- over time.
type galaxies. Here, we perform full spectral fitting of spiral galaxies
An alternative approach which is more suited to late- from the MaNGA survey (Bundy et al. 2015) and measure
type galaxies is to explore the stellar populations in di↵er- spatially-resolved star formation histories, to uncover their
ent regions of a galaxy, particularly through studying how formation sequences.
the mean stellar age varies with radius. This method re-
quires high-quality spectral data at multiple locations across This paper is structured as follows. In §2, we outline
the face of a galaxy, and so has only been undertaken the data we use from the MaNGA survey. In §3 we describe
in detail for large numbers of galaxies since the advent how a sample of spiral galaxies from the MaNGA target list
of integral-field spectroscopic surveys such as the Calar- was selected, and in §4 we detail the spectral fitting method
Alto Legacy Integral Field Array (CALIFA; Sánchez et al. employed (with some tests of this method outlined in Ap-
2012), Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph pendix A). We then describe how the derived star-formation
(SAMI; Croom et al. 2012), and Mapping Nearby Galaxies histories are processed in §5. The mean age and metallicity
at APO (MaNGA; Bundy et al. 2015) surveys. Using such gradients are derived in §6. In §7 and §8 we analyse the star-
a “fossil record” approach applied to integral-field spectro- formation histories and spatially-resolved stellar populations
scopic data has revealed that most galaxies exhibit negative in more detail, and infer the evolution of the mass-size rela-
age gradients (e.g. Mehlert et al. 2003; Sánchez-Blázquez tion in §9. Finally, we discuss the interpretation and context
et al. 2014; González Delgado et al. 2015; Goddard et al. of the results in §10.
2017) — with younger outskirts than centres — or earlier
formation times of the central regions (e.g. Ibarra-Medel
et al. 2016) providing more evidence for a dominant “in-
side out” growth mode occurring in galaxies of all Hubble 2 DATA
types. This is also backed up by Sacchi et al. (2019) for the 2.1 MaNGA
case of NGC 7793, who find that broad-band observations
of resolved stellar populations in this nearby spiral galaxy MaNGA (Bundy et al. 2015) is part of the fourth generation
indicate a clear gradient in stellar age. of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV; Blanton et al.
2017). By the survey’s completion is 2020, MaNGA will have
By applying stellar population modelling methods to acquired 2.5 arcsec resolution integral-field spectroscopic ob-
integral-field spectroscopic data from the CALIFA survey, servations of more than 10,000 galaxies in the redshift range
Cid Fernandes et al. (2013, 2014), Pérez et al. (2013), 0.01 < z < 0.15 (Yan et al. 2016b). The survey makes use of
González Delgado et al. (2017), and Garcı́a-Benito et al. the BOSS spectrograph (Smee et al. 2013) on the 2.5-metre
(2019) have shown that it is possible to reveal much more SDSS telescope (Gunn et al. 2006) at the Apache Point Ob-
about a galaxy’s history by deriving full star-formation his- servatory, which has a spectral resolution of R ⇡ 2000 and
tories rather than mean ages. We have shown previously that covers a large wavelength range of 3600-10300 Å. The raw
such analyses of the spatial variation in stellar populations data’s calibration is described by Yan et al. (2016a), with
of spiral galaxies can help us understand the structure of the datacubes then reduced using MaNGA’s data reduction
the spiral arms and bars, but here we investigate how such pipeline (DRP; Law et al. 2016). For each target galaxy, ob-
approaches can also help us study the evolution and growth servations are taken out to at least either 1.5 Re or 2.5 Re (to
of populations of galaxies. form the “Primary” and “Secondary” samples respectively;
Comparative studies of the masses and sizes of galax- Law et al. 2015), where Re is the elliptical half-light radius
ies at di↵erent lookback times are most e↵ective to measure measured photometrically by the NASA-Sloan Atlas (Blan-
the growth of early-type galaxies since these are typically ton et al. 2011). This is achieved using integral-field units
the most massive and luminous objects at any given red- of five di↵erent sizes, from the 127-fibre IFUs with a diam-
shift so are easy to identify. By contrast, a fossil record eter of 32 arcsec, to the 19-fibre IFUs of 12 arcsec diameter
analysis acts as a complementary approach best suited to (Drory et al. 2015).
— but by no means limited to; see e.g. Lacerna et al. (2020) The MaNGA target selection was chosen to obtain a flat
— studying the growth of late-type galaxies, as such galax- distribution in log(stellar mass) (Wake et al. 2017). Neither
ies have in general had continued growth over the last sev- the Primary nor Secondary samples are therefore volume-
eral Gyr. This extended star-formation in late-type galaxies limited; instead the high-mass galaxies are over-represented
can be traced using fossil record methods, providing that while the low-mass galaxies are under-represented. The Pri-
care is taken to ensure that older populations can be de- mary+ (“colour-enhanced”) sample is an extended Primary
tected when the flux may be dominated by the younger and sample but with an oversampling of the “green valley” galax-
brighter populations. Of course, there exists a population of ies (Wake et al. 2017) so is therefore also unrepresentative in
spiral galaxies which are passive (see for example Masters this way too. However, since the sample selection in all cases
et al. 2010; Fraser-McKelvie et al. 2016) — contrary to the is well-defined (Wake et al. 2017), a weighting has been de-
well-known relation between the morphology and star for- termined for each galaxy to correct for these selection biases
mation rate (Tully et al. 1982; Baldry et al. 2004) — so a and form a representative volume-limited sample (referred
morphological classification does not always define the ex- to as the “Primary+ sample weighting” throughout this pa-
tent of the star-formation history of each galaxy. However, per).
for consistency, we have chosen to study a galaxy population In this work, we make use of some of the analysis out-
selected on their morphology rather than colour, to better puts of MaNGA’s data analysis pipeline (DAP; Westfall

MNRAS 000, 1–17 (2019)