Abstract Stellar ages and metallicities are crucial for understanding the formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies. However, due to the age-metallicity degeneracy, it is hard to measure these two parameters accurately with broad-band photometry. In this paper, we observed high-resolution spectra for a sample of 20 nearby elliptical galaxies (EGs) with the NAOC 2.16m telescope, and determined stellar ages and metallicities by using the empirical population synthesis and Lick/IDS index system methods. We found that stellar ages from these two methods are consistent with each other for purely old EGs; however, stellar metallicities show a zeropoint offset of 0.5 Z⊙ Our results confirm that stellar populations in low-density environment galaxies are more diverse compared to their high-density counterparts. We also investigated the element abundance-galaxy mass relation for nearby elliptical galaxies.

Keywords galaxies: elliptical and lenticular, cD — galaxies: statistics — galaxies: stellar content

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