Near infrared observations of the truncation of stellar disks Florido Navio, Estrella Battaner López, Eduardo Guijarro Román, Ana Garzón, F. Jiménez Vicente, Jorge Galaxies Structure Photometry We present a first study of truncation of the stellar disks of spiral galaxies in the near infrared. Observations of NGC4013, NGC4217, NGC6504 and NGC5981 were made with the CAIN NIR camera on the CST in Tenerife. This wavelength range provides the best description of the phenomenon, not only because extinction effects are minimized, but also because the distribution of the old stellar population is directly obtained. The four galaxies are edge-on and an inversion method was developed to obtain the deprojected profiles. We did not assume any model of the different galactic components. The ``truncation curve'', i.e. T(R)= mu(R)- mu_{D}(R), where mu is the actual surface brightness in mag/arcsec^2 and mu_{D} the exponential disk surface brightness, has been obtained with unprecedented precision. It is suggested that T(R) is proportional to (R_{t}-R)^{-1}, where R_{t} is the truncation radius, i.e. the radius beyond which no star is observed. 2013-11-06T12:50:52Z 2013-11-06T12:50:52Z 2001 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Florido, E.; et al. Near infrared observations of the truncation of stellar disks. Astronomy and Astrophysics, 378(1): 82-96 (2001). [http://hdl.handle.net/10481/29040] 0004-6361 1432-0746 doi: 10.1051/0004-6361:20011190 arXiv:astro-ph/0109295v1 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/29040 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License EDP Sciences