# E+A Galaxies in the near-IR: Field and Clusters

## 1. Introduction: what is an E+A galaxy?

Most of the E+A galaxies present mid- to early-type morphologies, as it was already shown by some authors (, ). A little fraction of them have late Hubble types (but see ). However, their spectra is peculiar: they do not have emission lines, representative of an ongoing star formation, but they have strong Balmer absorption lines, representative of a young population (A and B spectral types), and also strong Mg b $`\lambda 5175`$, Ca H & K $`\lambda 3934`$, $`\lambda 3968`$ and Fe $`\lambda 5270`$ lines, indicating that they have a rich population of G, K and M spectral types. This young population suggests that the E+A galaxies are 1 Gyr to 4 Gyr old. Are there other peculiar signatures in the spectra of the E+A galaxies? In particular, are their late-type star populations and their AGB population also different to those of normal galaxies? If so, we can conclude that the E+A phenomenon also involves changes in their older population. In that case, models trying to explain the nature of the E+A galaxies should also fit the signatures observed in the old stellar content.

## 2. Near-IR photometry of E+A galaxies

In order to investigate the above questions, I have started a program to observe southern E+A galaxies in the near-IR. All the observations are being carried on at Las Campanas Observatory (LCO), using NICMOS3 HgCdTe arrays (256 $`\times `$ 256 pixels) at both the 1-m Swope telescope (0.599 arcsec/pix, 2.5 arcmin<sup>2</sup> FOV), and the 2.5-m du Pont telescope (0.42 arcsec/pix, 1.8 arcmin<sup>2</sup> FOV). All the observations are carried on under photometric conditions and seeing $`<1.0`$ arcsec, and include $`J`$, $`H`$ and $`K_s`$ imaging. The sample of galaxies includes E+As from nearby ($`z<0.05`$, ) and intermediate-redshift ($`z0.3`$, ) clusters, as well as E+As located in the field , at $`z0.15`$. Photometry is performed on the calibrated images using SExtractor . Total apparent magnitudes and colors are computed, and compared with spectrophotometric models of galaxy evolution generated using GISSEL96  (see Figure 1). Rest-frame colors are extremely dependent on models, necessary to compute K-corrections. Near-IR spectroscopy will be obtained soon, in order to have reliable K-corrections, allowing to derive robust interpretations from rest-frame colors.

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