Curvature in the scaling relations of early-type galaxies

By Joseph B. Hyde, Mariangela Bernardi. 2008

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We select a sample of about 50 000 early-type galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), calibrate fitting formulae which correct for known problems with photometric reductions of extended objects, apply these corrections and then measure a number of pairwise scaling relations in the corrected sample. We show that, because they are not seeing corrected, the use of Petrosian-based quantities in magnitude-limited surveys leads to biases, and suggest that this is one reason why Petrosian-based analyses of brightest cluster galaxies have failed to find significant differences from the bulk of the early-type population. These biases are not present when seeing-corrected parameters derived from deVaucouleur fits are used. Most of the scaling relations we study show evidence for curvature: the most luminous galaxies have smaller velocity dispersions, larger sizes and fainter surface brightnesses than expected if there were no curvature. These statements remain true if we replace luminosities with stellar masses; they suggest that dissipation is less important at the massive end. There is curvature in the dynamical to stellar mass relation as well: the ratio of dynamical to stellar mass increases as stellar mass increases, but it curves upwards from this scaling both at small and at large stellar masses. In all cases, the curvature at low masses becomes apparent when the sample becomes dominated by objects with stellar masses smaller than 3 x 10 10 M ⊙ . We quantify all these trends using second-order polynomials; these generally provide significantly better description of the data than linear fits, except at the least luminous end.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf03d21817ae071dfe9c4ccb6ce75c60d1b1ff0c

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Citations in the corpus

Structure and Kinematics of Early-Type Galaxies from Integral Field Spectroscopy (2016, background): “A break in the M∗ − σ at M∗ ≈ 2 × 1011M was reported by large SDSS studies, but no break was observed at lower masses (Hyde & Bernardi 2009; Bernardi et al. 2011).”
Galactic accretion and the outer structure of galaxies in the CDM model (2013, unknown): “> 1011M (e.g. Shen et al. 2003; Hyde & Bernardi 2009).”
THE SLOAN LENS ACS SURVEY. X. STELLAR, DYNAMICAL, AND TOTAL MASS CORRELATIONS OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “…and stellar velocity dispersion known as the Fundamental Plane (Faber et al. 1987; Djorgovski & Davis 1987, hereafter FP), and its mass counterpart the Stellar Mass Plane (M∗P; e.g., Hyde & Bernardi 2009b, where surface brightness is replaced by stellar mass) have provided two key insights.”
GALAXY CLUSTER BARYON FRACTIONS REVISITED (2013, methodology): “For example, Hyde & Bernardi (2009) find magnitude corrections of up to 30%.”
THE COSMOLOGICAL SIZE AND VELOCITY DISPERSION EVOLUTION OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2011, background): “Other published local mass-size relations have slightly different slopes and offsets (see e.g. Hyde & Bernardi 2009; Guo et al. 2009; Williams et al. 2010) which does, however, not affect our general conclusions.”
The ATLAS3D project – XX. Mass–size and mass–σ distributions of early-type galaxies: bulge fraction drives kinematics, mass-to-light ratio, molecular gas fraction and stellar initial mass function (2012, methodology): “The same characteristics mass M ≈ 3 × 1010 M of Kauffmann et al. (2003a), which constitute the location of the break in our ZOE, was found by Hyde & Bernardi (2009a) in the mass–size relation of 5 × 104 SDSS galaxies.”
THE TWO PHASES OF GALAXY FORMATION (2010, background): “We find that the accreted stars are primarily responsi- ble for the low redshift size increase in massive galaxies (see e.g. Hyde & Bernardi 2009).”
Galaxy luminosities, stellar masses, sizes, velocity dispersions as a function of morphological type (2009, methodology): “…criteria, using either crude measures of the light profile (e.g. Strateva et al. 2001), the colours (e.g. Baldry et al. 2004) or some combination of photometric and spectroscopic information (Bernardi et al. 2003; Hyde & Bernardi 2009), allow one to separate early-type galaxies from the rest.”
The massive end of the luminosity and stellar mass functions: Dependence on the fit to the light profile (2013, background): “In addition, Petrosian-derived quantities are not seeing corrected; this impacts studies of scaling relations (e.g. see Appendix A in Hyde & Bernardi 2009) more than our current study of the mass function.”