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Register a new userOn the Color Magnitude Relation of Early-type Galaxies
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In this letter we present a study of the color magnitude relation of 468 early-type galaxies in the Virgo Cluster with Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data. The analysis of our homogeneous, model-independent data set reveals that, in all colors (u-g, g-r, g-i, i-z) similarly, giant and dwarf early-type galaxies follow a continuous color magnitude relation (CMR) that is best described by an S-shape. The magnitude range and quality of our data allows us to clearly confirm that the CMR in Virgo is not linear. Additionally, we analyze the scatter about the CMR and find that it increases in the intermediate-luminosity regime. Nevertheless, despite this observational distinction, we conclude from the similarly shaped CMR of semi-analytic model predictions that dwarfs and giants could be of the same origin.
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The traditional use of fixed apertures in determining the well known color-magnitude (CM) relation of early type galaxies, coupled with the presence of radial color gradients within these systems, introduces a bias in the CM relation itself. The effect of this bias is studied here deriving a CM relation which is based on color measurements carried out homogeneously within an aperture of radius equal to that of the galaxy effective radius. A sample of 48 giant early-type galaxies in the Coma cluster, with CCD observations in the U- and V-band, is used for this derivation. It is found that internal radial color gradients in early-type galaxies cannot be neglected when discussing the colors of these systems, and that the CM relation derived using color measurements within the effective radius is significantly flatter than those based on fixed-aperture color measurements. With the presently available data it is impossible to determine whether the relation is completely flat, or whether a small correlation is still present between galaxy color and luminosity.
We present the ultraviolet (UV) color-color relation of early-type galaxies (ETGs) in the nearby universe (0.05 < z < 0.12) to investigate the properties of hot stellar populations responsible for the UV excess (UVX). The initial sample of ETGs is selected by the spectroscopic redshift and the morphology parameter from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR7, and then cross-matched with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) Far-UV (FUV) and Near-UV (NUV) GR6 data. The cross-matched ETG sample is further classified by their emission line characteristics in the optical spectra into quiescent, star-forming, and AGN categories. Contaminations from early-type spiral galaxies, mergers, and morphologically disturbed galaxies are removed by visual inspection. By drawing the FUV - NUV (as a measure of UV spectral shape) vs. FUV - r (as a measure of UVX strength) diagram for the final sample of ~3700 quiescent ETGs, we find that the old and dead ETGs consist of a well-defined sequence in UV colors, the UV red sequence, so that the stronger UVX galaxies should have a harder UV spectral shape systematically. However, the observed UV spectral slope is too steep to be reproduced by the canonical stellar population models in which the UV flux is mainly controlled by age or metallicity parameters. Moreover, 2 mag of color spreads both in FUV - NUV and FUV - r appear to be ubiquitous among any subsets in distance or luminosity. This implies that the UVX in ETGs could be driven by yet another parameter which might be even more influential than age or metallicity.
We present the analysis of the color-magnitude relation (CMR) for a sample of 57 X-ray detected Abell clusters within the redshift interval 0.02 <= z <= 0.18. We use the B-R vs R color-magnitude plane to establish that the CMR is present in all our low-redshift clusters and can be parameterized by a single straight line.We find that the CMRs for this large cluster sample of different richness and cluster types are consistent with having universal properties. The k-corrected color of the individual CMRs in the sample at a fixed absolute magnitude have a small intrinsic dispersion of ~0.05 mag. The slope of the CMR is consistent with being the same for all clusters, with the variations entirely accountable by filter band shifting effects. We determine the mean of the dispersion of the 57 CMRs to be 0.074 mag, with a small rms scatter of 0.026 mag. However, a modest amount of the dispersion arises from photometric measurement errors and possible background cluster superpositions; and the derived mean dispersion is an upper limit. Models which explain the CMR in terms of metallicity and passive evolution can naturally reproduce the observed behavior of the CMR in this paper. The observed properties of the CMR are consistent with models in which the last episode of significant star formation in cluster early-type galaxies occurred significantly more than ~3 Gyr ago, and that the core set of early-type galaxies in clusters were formed more than 7 Gyr ago. (abridged)
We present a study of the color evolution of elliptical and S0 galaxies in six clusters of galaxies inside the redshift range 0.78 < z < 1.27. For each cluster, we used imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope to determine morphological types by both an automated technique and from visual inspection. We performed simulations to determine the accuracy of the automated classifications and found a success rate of ~75% at m(L*) or brighter magnitudes for most of our HST imaging data with the fraction of late--type galaxies identified as early--type galaxies to be ~10% at m(L*) to ~20% at m(L*)+2. From ground based optical and near-infrared imaging, we measured the zero-point and scatter in the color--magnitude relation of the early-type populations, which when combined with Stanford et al. (1998), yields a sample of cluster early--type galaxies that span a lookback time of 9 gigayears from the present. We see the colors of the early--type cluster members become bluer with increasing redshift. We fit a set of models to the change in the color as a function of redshift with the best fitting values ranging from a formation redshift of 3^+2_-1 to 5_-3. The large scatter in resulting formation epochs, which depends on the details of the models used, implies that we can conclude that the oldest stars in the elliptical galaxies appear to have formed at redshifts of z>3. We find possible evolution in the scatter of the colors, with some high redshift clusters showing scatter as small as the Coma cluster but others showing much larger scatter. Those clusters with a small scatter imply either a formation redshift of at least z ~ 3 or a smaller spread in the range of formation redshifts at lower redshifts, assuming a Gaussian distribution of star-formation around the mean epoch.
We confirm the detection of 3 groups in the Lynx supercluster, at z~1.3, and give their redshifts and masses. We study the properties of the group galaxies as compared to the central clusters, RXJ0849+4452 and RXJ0848+4453, selecting 89 galaxies in the clusters and 74 galaxies in the groups. We morphologically classify galaxies by visual inspection, noting that our early-type galaxy (ETG) sample would have been contaminated at the 30% -40% level by simple automated classification methods (e.g. based on Sersic index). In luminosity selected samples, both clusters and groups show high fractions of Sa galaxies. The ETG fractions never rise above ~50% in the clusters, which is low compared to the fractions observed in clusters at z~1. However, ETG plus Sa fractions are similar to those observed for ETGs in clusters at z~1. Bulge-dominated galaxies visually classified as Sas might also be ETGs with tidal features or merger remnants. They are mainly red and passive, and span a large range in luminosity. Their star formation seems to have been quenched before experiencing a morphological transformation. Because their fraction is smaller at lower redshifts, they might be the spiral population that evolves into ETGs. For mass-selected samples, the ETG fraction show no significant evolution with respect to local clusters, suggesting that morphological transformations occur at lower masses and densities. The ETG mass-size relation shows evolution towards smaller sizes at higher redshift in both clusters and groups, while the late-type mass-size relation matches that observed locally. The group ETG red sequence shows lower zero points and larger scatters than in clusters, both expected to be an indication of a younger galaxy population. The estimated age difference is small when compared to the difference in age at different galaxy masses.
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