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 2.16 m 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.
We analyze the optical spectrum of type 1 QSO SDSS J1425＋3231. This object is interesting since its narrow emission lines, such as [O Ⅲ]λλ4959, 5007, are double-peaked, and the line structure can be modeled well by three Gaussian components： two components for the two peaks （we refer to the peaks at low/high redshift as ＂the blue/red component＂） and another one for the line wing which has the same line center as that of the blue component, but is- 3 times broader. The separation between the blue and red components is -500km s-1 with the blue component being -2 times broader than the red one. The Hβ emission can be separated into four components： two for the double-peaked narrow line and two for the broad line which comes from the broad line regions. The black hole mass estimated from the broad Hβ emission line using the typical reverberation mapping relation is 0.85 × 108 M⊙, which is consistent with that derived from parameters of [O Ⅲ]λ 5007 of the blue component. We suggest that this QSO might be a dual AGN system; the broad Hβ emission line is mainly contributed by the primary black hole （traced by the blue component） while the broad Hβ component of the secondary black hole （traced by the red component） is hard to be separated out considering a resolution of - 2 000 for SDSS spectra or it may be totally obscured by the dusty torus.
