Probing Evolutionary Population Synthesis Models in the Near Infrared with Early Type Galaxies

LGDH thanks CAPES and CNPq. RR thanks CNPq and FAPERGS for partial funding of this project. ARA thanks CNPq for partial support to this work. LPM thanks CNPQ and FAPESP for partial funding of this project. CK acknowledges support through the research project AYA2017-79724-C4-4-P from the Spanish PNAYA. This research made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This study uses data provided by the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey (http://califa.caha.es/). Based on observations collected at the Centro Astronomico Hispano Aleman (CAHA) at Calar Alto, operated jointly by the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (CSIC). We thank the referee Reynier Peletier for carefully reading our paper and for giving such constructive comments which substantially helped improving the quality of the paper.