Estimating Fixed-Frame Galaxy Magnitudes in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By M. Blanton, J. Brinkmann, István Csabai, M. Doi, Daniel J. Eisenstein, M. Fukugita, James E. Gunn, David W. Hogg, David Schlegel. 2002

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Broadband measurements of flux for galaxies at different redshifts measure different regions of the rest-frame galaxy spectrum. Certain astronomical questions, such as the evolution of the luminosity function of galaxies, require transforming these inherently redshift-dependent magnitudes into redshift-independent quantities. To prepare to address these astronomical questions, investigated in detail in subsequent papers, we fit spectral energy distributions (SEDs) to broadband photometric observations in the context of the optical observations of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Linear combinations of four spectral templates can reproduce the five SDSS magnitudes of all galaxies to the precision of the photometry. Expressed in the appropriate coordinate system, the locus of the coefficients multiplying the templates is planar and, in fact, nearly linear. The resulting reconstructed SEDs can be used to recover fixed-frame magnitudes over a range of redshifts. This process yields consistent results in the sense that, within each sample, the intrinsic colors of similar type galaxies are nearly constant with redshift. We compare our results with simpler interpolation methods and galaxy spectrophotometry from the SDSS. The software that generates these results is publicly available and easily adapted to handle a wide range of galaxy observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/965a2647b9cca38fbb5cb28679f3aa6b3619325a

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Citations in the corpus

AGN-controlled cooling in elliptical galaxies (2006, background): “R≈1.2 (e.g. Blanton et al. 2003), and the absolute magnitude of the sun (MB⊙ = 5.48).”
Properties of galaxy groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – I. The dependence of colour, star formation and morphology on halo mass (2005, methodology): “…by L total = Lgroup ∫ ∞ 0 (L) L dL∫ ∞ L lim (L) L dL , (A4) where Llim is the minimum luminosity of a galaxy that can be observed at the redshift of the group, and (L) is the galaxy luminosity function in the 0.1r band, which we model using the Schechter function fit of Blanton et al. (2003a).”
Dependence of galaxy quenching on halo mass and distance from its centre (2012, background): “Galaxies can be crudely divided into two classes: blue star-forming disc galaxies and red ellipticals dominated by old stars (Strateva et al. 2001; Kauffmann et al. 2003; Blanton et al. 2003; Baldry et al. 2004).”
Relationship between Environment and the Broadband Optical Properties of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2003, methodology): “Galaxy luminosities and colors (measured by the standard SDSS petrosian technique; Petrosian 1976; Strauss et al. 2002) are computed in fixed bandpasses, using Galactic extinction corrections (Schlegel et al. 1998) and K-corrections (computed with kcorrect v1 16; Blanton et al. 2003).”
Closing in on a Short-Hard Burst Progenitor: Constraints from Early-Time Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy of a Possible Host Galaxy of GRB 050509b (2005, background): “The sky density of galaxies with comparable apparent magnitude brighter than G1 is ∼ 40 per square degree (Blanton et al. 2003b).”
The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: the role of galaxy environment in the cosmic star formation history (2007, methodology): “Measurements of Rest–frame Colors and Luminosities For both the SDSS and DEEP2 galaxy samples, we compute rest–frame U − B colors and absolute B–band magnitudes (MB) using the kcorrect K–correction code (version v4 1 2) of Blanton & Roweis (2007, see also Blanton et al. 2003).”
The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. II. Stellar Populations and Internal Structure of Early-Type Lens Galaxies (2005, methodology): “As an independent check of our surface photometry and color transformations, we used publicly available code (Blanton et al. 2003) to compute absolute magnitudes from the SDSS model photometry finding excellent agreement (e.g. the difference in absolute B magnitude is less than 0.05 with an rms…”
Morphology Segregation of Galaxies in Color-Color Gradient Space (2005, background): “Endeavors to develop an objective, automatic, and successful morphology classifier applicable to large libraries of digital images have resulted in various schemes (Yamauchi et al. 2005; Blanton et al. 2003b; Abraham et al. 1996, 2003; Strateva et al. 2001; Shimasaku et al. 2001; Doi et al. 1993).”
THE COS-HALOS SURVEY: PHYSICAL CONDITIONS AND BARYONIC MASS IN THE LOW-REDSHIFT CIRCUMGALACTIC MEDIUM (2014, methodology): “At a given galaxy stellar mass determined by kcorrect (Blanton et al. 2003) from the SDSS ugriz photometry, we interpolate along the abundance matching relation of Moster et al. (2010) to find the halo mass (Mhalo).”
The DEEP2 galaxy redshift survey: evolution of the colour–density relation at 0.4 < z < 1.35 (2006, methodology): “…g′ filter response, quantum efficiency, telescope throughput, and atmospheric extinction estimates9, the K–correction code (kcorrect version v4 1 2) of Blanton et al. (2003), and our CFHT B,R, I photometry (Coil et al. 2004b), we compute the rest– frame u∗ − g′ color for each galaxy in the DEEP2…”
Black Holes in Pseudobulges and Spheroidals: A Change in the Black Hole-Bulge Scaling Relations at Low Mass (2008, background): “Thus, in order to be consistent with the observed central value and scatter for the inactive relation, we would require that the galaxy luminosity function rise by a factor of 300 between MI ¼ 18 and 20 mag, which can be ruled out categorically (e.g., Blanton et al. 2003b).”
Berkeley Supernova Ia Program – I. Observations, data reduction and spectroscopic sample of 582 low-redshift Type Ia supernovae (2012, methodology): “0.02 mag in all filters (Blanton et al. 2003; Blanton & Roweis 2007).”
Selection and Photometric Properties of K+A Galaxies (2003, methodology): “There is another measure 8 on an 8 h 1 Mpc scale, which is a measure of the three-dimensional comoving number density excess around each galaxy in a sphere of 8 h 1 Mpc comoving radius, with no correction for peculiar velocities, as described elsewhere (Hogg et al. 2003; Blanton et al. 2003d).”
Percolation Galaxy Groups and Clusters in the SDSS Redshift Survey: Identification, Catalogs, and the Multiplicity Function (2006, methodology): “Galaxy magnitudes are corrected for Galactic extinction (Schlegel et al. 1998) and absolute magnitudes are k-corrected (Blanton et al. 2003a) and corrected for passive evolution (Blanton et al. 2003b) to rest-frame magnitudes at redshift z = 0.1.”
The environmental dependence of the relations between stellar mass, structure, star formation and nuclear activity in galaxies (2004, background): “In their most recent paper, Blanton et al (2003b) find that galaxy colour is the property that is most tightly related to local environment.”
The C4 Clustering Algorithm: Clusters of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2005, methodology): “All magnitudes are k-corrected according to Blanton et al. (2003a) and extinction corrected according to Schlegel, Finkbeiner, and Davis (1998).”
Measurement of Galaxy Cluster Sizes, Radial Profiles, and Luminosity Functions from SDSS Photometric Data (2004, methodology): “To determine the mean space density of field galaxies, we use the g, r, i, and z luminosity functions of Blanton et al. (2003a), which are properly normalized to a volume density and are determined with an SDSS spectroscopic sample of galaxies from the same region of sky.”
The Three-Dimensional Power Spectrum of Galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2003, methodology): “The tiling algorithm (Blanton et al. 2003) is then run in order to position tiles and assign fibers to them, after which plates are designed (that is, any available fibers are assigned to various classes of auxiliary targets as well as to sky and calibration stars) and then drilled.”
The clustering of the SDSS DR7 Main Galaxy Sample I: a 4 per cent distance measure at z=0.15 (2014, methodology): “They include K-corrected absolute magnitudes, determined using the methods of Blanton et al. (2003), and detailed information on the mask.”
The Tully-Fisher Relation and its Residuals for a Broadly Selected Sample of Galaxies (2006, background): “…the distributions of our sample galaxies in the color-magnitude plane, Mr versus g r. Contours show the luminosity-weighted color magnitude distribution for the full DR2 sample of galaxies from Blanton et al. (2003b) with contours containing 25%, 50%, and 75% of the DR2 total luminosity density.”