Anti-truncated stellar light profiles in the outer regions of STAGES
  spiral galaxies: bulge or disc related?
  We present a comparison of azimuthally averaged radial surface brightness
mu(r) profiles and analytical bulge-disc decompositions (de Vaucouleurs,
r^(1/4) bulge plus exponential disc) for spiral galaxies using Hubble Space
Telescope/Advanced Camera for Surveys V-band imaging from the Space Telescope
A901/2 Galaxy Evolution Survey (STAGES). In the established classification
scheme, antitruncated mu(r) profiles (Type III) have a broken exponential disc
with a shallower region beyond the break radius r_brk. The excess light at
large radii (r > r_brk) can either be caused by an outer exponential disc (Type
III-d) or an extended spheroidal component (Type III-s). Using our comparisons,
we determine the contribution of bulge light at r > r_brk for a large sample of
78 (barred/unbarred, Sa-Sd) spiral galaxies with outer disc antitruncations
(mu_brk > 24 mag arcsec^-2). In the majority of cases (~85 per cent), evidence
indicates that excess light at r > r_brk is related to an outer shallow disc
(Type III-d). Here, the contribution of bulge light at r > r_brk is either
negligible (~70 per cent) or too little to explain the antitruncation (~15 per
cent). However in the latter cases, bulge light can affect the measured disc
properties (e.g. mu_brk, outer scalelength). In the remaining cases (~15 per
cent), light at r > r_brk is dominated by the bulge (Type III-s). Here, for
most cases the bulge profile dominates at all radii and only occasionally (3
galaxies, ~5 per cent) extends beyond that of a dominant disc and explains the
excess light at r > r_brk. We thus conclude that in the vast majority of cases
antitruncated outer discs cannot be explained by bulge light and thus remain a
pure disc phenomenon.
