The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. XIII. SBF Distance Catalog and the Three-dimensional Structure of the Virgo Cluster

By S. Mei, J. Blakeslee, P. Côté, J. Tonry, M. West, L. Ferrarese, A. Jord'an, E. Peng, A. Anthony, D. Merritt. 2007

554 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey consists of HST ACS imaging for 100 early-type galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, observed in the F475W (≈SDSS g) and F850LP (≈SDSS z) filters. We derive distances for 84 of these galaxies using the method of surface brightness fluctuations (SBFs), present the SBF distance catalog, and use this database to examine the three-dimensional distribution of early-type galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. The SBF distance moduli have a mean (random) measurement error of 0.07 mag (0.5 Mpc), or roughly 3 times better than previous SBF measurements for Virgo Cluster galaxies. Five galaxies lie at a distance of d ≈ 23 Mpc and are members of the W' cloud. The remaining 79 galaxies have a narrow distribution around our adopted distance of ⟨d⟩ = 16.5 ± 0.1 (random mean error) ±1.1 Mpc (systematic). The rms distance scatter of this sample is σ(d) = 0.6 ± 0.1 Mpc, with little or no dependence on morphological type or luminosity class (i.e., 0.7 ± 0.1 and 0.5 ± 0.1 Mpc for the giants and dwarfs, respectively). The back-to-front depth of the cluster measured from our sample of early-type galaxies is 2.4 ± 0.4 Mpc (i.e., ±2 σ of the intrinsic distance distribution). The M87 (cluster A) and M49 (cluster B) subclusters are found to lie at distances of 16.7 ± 0.2 and 16.4 ± 0.2 Mpc, respectively. There may be a third subcluster associated with M86. A weak correlation between velocity and line-of-sight distance may be a faint echo of the cluster velocity distribution not having yet completely virialized. In three dimensions, Virgo's early-type galaxies appear to define a slightly triaxial distribution, with axis ratios of (1 : 0.7 : 0.5). The principal axis of the best-fit ellipsoid is inclined ~20°-40° from the line of sight, while the galaxies belonging to the W' cloud lie on an axis inclined by ~10°-15°.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biophysics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. M. Cappellari
2. Luis C. Ho
3. P. Hopkins
4. J. Kormendy
5. L. Hernquist
6. T. Naab
7. Alister W. Graham
8. M. Sarzi

In Biophysics

1. T. Naab

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

1. M. Cappellari
2. M. Sarzi
3. Roger Davies
4. R. McDermid
5. M. Bureau
6. P. de Zeeuw
7. D. Krajnovi'c
8. H. Kuntschner

Citations in the corpus

• STRUCTURE AND FORMATION OF ELLIPTICAL AND SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES (2008, methodology): “VCC 1192, VCC 1199, and VCC 1489 do not have distance measurements in Mei et al. (2007); for these, we used the mean distance for “all [79] galaxies (no W′ cloud)” given in Table 3 of Mei et al. (2007).”
• GALAXIES AT THE EXTREMES: ULTRA-DIFFUSE GALAXIES IN THE VIRGO CLUSTER (2015, background): “G A ] 2 4 Ju l 2 01 5 2 dius (Rvir = 1.55 Mpc; McLaughlin 1999).”
• The ATLAS3D project – I. A volume-limited sample of 260 nearby early-type galaxies: science goals and selection criteria (2010, methodology): “Column (4):SBF = 1 if the galaxy is in Tonry et al. (2001) andSBF = 2 if it is in Mei et al. (2007) or both.”
• The ATLAS3D project - VII. A new look at the morphology of nearby galaxies: the kinematic morphology-density relation (2011, methodology): “The Virgo membershipis given in table 3 and 4 of Paper I and was defined as being within a radiusR = 3.5 Mpc from the centre of the cluster assumed at coordinates RA=12h28m19s and DEC=+12◦40′ (Mould et al. 2000) and distanceD = 16.5 Mpc (Mei et al. 2007).”
• THE NEXT GENERATION VIRGO CLUSTER SURVEY (NGVS). I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SURVEY (2012, methodology): “Indeed, the VCC continues to serve as the departure point for innumerable, multi-wavelength studies of the Virgo cluster and its constituent galaxies (see Section 2.2).”
• The ATLAS3D project XV: benchmark for early-type galaxies scaling relations from 260 dynamical models: mass-to-light ratio, dark matter, fundamental plane and mass plane (2012, methodology): “…from the same Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/432/3/1709/1747470 by guest on 25 July 2018 1738 M. Cappellari et al. population, or the ACSVCS sample in Mei et al. (2007) spans a slightly smaller set of distances within the Virgo cluster than the ATLAS3D Virgo sample.”
• The ATLAS3D project – IV. The molecular gas content of early-type galaxies (2011, methodology): “NGC 4435, 4476 and 4459 have distance measurements from surface brightness fluctuations (Mei et al. 2007) and these place them within a true distance of 1.3 Mpc from M87.”
• Families of dynamically hot stellar systems over 10 orders of magnitude in mass (2011, methodology): “References for the literature distance moduli (m−M)lit are: (a) Mieske et al. (2005a); (b) Mei et al. (2007); (c) Dirsch, Richtler & Bassino (2003); (d) Blakeslee et al. (2009).”
• WIDE-FIELD PRECISION KINEMATICS OF THE M87 GLOBULAR CLUSTER SYSTEM (2011, background): “One might suppose such an arrangement to be a consequence of filamentary accretion into the cluster (e.g., Knebe et al. 2004), but the Virgo filament is thought to run along rather than across the lineof-sight (Mei et al. 2007), i.e., probably not coincident with the major axis of M87.”
• The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances (2021, methodology): “As a result, the method has been applied widely to study the 3D structure of the nearest galaxy clusters (Mei et al. 2007; Blakeslee et al. 2009; Cantiello et al. 2018a), determine the physical size of the “shadow” (and thus the mass) of the supermassive black hole in M87 (Event Horizon Telescope…”
• Our Peculiar Motion Away from the Local Void (2007, methodology): “Third, we accept the SBF measures of Tonry et al. (2001) and Mei et al. (2007).”
• VLA IMAGING OF VIRGO SPIRALS IN ATOMIC GAS (VIVA). I. THE ATLAS AND THE H i PROPERTIES (2009, background): “For more detailed discussions of the three-dimensional structure of the Virgo cluster, see, for example, Gavazzi et al. (1999) and Mei et al. (2007).”
• The Structure and Dynamics of the Subparsec Jet in M87 Based on 50 VLBA Observations over 17 Years at 43 GHz (2018, unknown): “This region is at an intrinsic (deprojected) core distance of about 0.14 to 0.55 pc or 240 to 960 RS along the jet for our assumed angle to the line-of-sight (17◦), distance (16.7 Mpc), and black hole mass (6.1× 109 M⊙).”
• Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies (2013, methodology): “…for individual galaxies in the Virgo and Fornax clusters; (2) Tonry et al. (2001) SBF corrected via Equation A1 in Blakeslee et al. (2010); (3) Mei et al. (2007) SBF mean distance to the Virgo W′ cloud (de Vaucouleurs 1961); (4) Mei et al. (2007) SBF mean distance to the Virgo cluster (no W′…”
• The black hole mass–stellar velocity dispersion correlation: bulges versus pseudo-bulges (2008, methodology): “The distances to the galaxies in Virgo cluster (NGC 4473, NGC 4486, NGC 4486A, NGC 4552, NGC 4564, NGC 4649) are based on the new SBF measurement by Mei et al. (2007).”
• The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey: The ALFALFA Extragalactic H i Source Catalog (2018, unknown): “Where primary distances are not available, objects in the Virgo region are assigned to likely Virgo substructures (Mei et al. 2007) and then the distances to those subclusters are adopted following Hallenbeck et al. (2012).”