The HST ACS Coma Cluster Treasury Survey is a deep two passband imaging survey of the nearest very rich cluster of galaxies, covering a range of galaxy density environments. The imaging is complemented by a recent wide field redshift survey of the cl
uster conducted with Hectospec on the 6.5m MMT. Among the many scientific applications for this data are the search for compact galaxies. In this paper, we present the discovery of seven compact (but quite luminous) stellar systems, ranging from M32-like galaxies down to ultra-compact dwarfs (UCDs)/dwarf to globular transition objects (DGTOs). We find that all seven compact galaxies require a two-component fit to their light profile and have measured velocity dispersions that exceed those expected for typical early-type galaxies at their luminosity. From our structural parameter analysis we conclude that three of the sample should be classified as compact ellipticals or M32-like galaxies, the remaining four being less extreme systems. The three compact ellipticals are all found to have old luminosity weighted ages (> 12 Gyr), intermediate metallicities (-0.6 < [Fe/H] < -0.1) and high [Mg/Fe] (> 0.25). Our findings support a tidal stripping scenario as the formation mode of compact galaxies covering the luminosity range studied here. We speculate that at least two early-type morphologies may serve as the progenitor of compact galaxies in clusters.
The Fornax Cluster Spectroscopic Survey (FCSS) is an all-object survey of a region around the Fornax Cluster of galaxies undertaken using the 2dF multi-object spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. Its aim was to obtain spectra for a complet
e sample of all objects with 16.5 < b_j < 19.7 irrespective of their morphology (i.e. including `stars, `galaxies and `merged images). We explore the extent to which (nearby) cluster galaxies are present in 2MASS. We consider the reasons for the omission of 2MASS galaxies from the FCSS and vice versa. We consider the intersection (2.9 square degrees on the sky) of our data set with the infra-red 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), using both the 2MASS Extended Source Catalogue (XSC) and the Point Source Catalogue (PSC). We match all the XSC objects to FCSS counterparts by position and also extract a sample of galaxies, selected by their FCSS redshifts, from the PSC. We confirm that all 114 XSC objects in the overlap sample are galaxies, on the basis of their FCSS velocities. A total of 23 Fornax Cluster galaxies appear in the matched data, while, as expected, the remainder of the sample lie at redshifts out to z = 0.2 (the spectra show that 61% are early type galaxies, 18% are intermediate types and 21% are strongly star forming).The PSC sample turns out to contain twice as many galaxies as does the XSC. However, only one of these 225 galaxies is a (dwarf) cluster member. On the other hand, galaxies which are unresolved in the 2MASS data (though almost all are resolved in the optical) amount to 71% of the non-cluster galaxies with 2MASS detections and have redshifts out to z=0.32.
