Statistical Properties of Bright Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Photometric System

By K. Shimasaku, M. Fukugita, M. Doi, M. Hamabe, T. Ichikawa, S. Okamura, M. Sekiguchi, N. Yasuda, J. Brinkmann, István Csabai and 7 more. 2001

272 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the photometric properties of 456 bright galaxies using imaging data recorded during the commissioning phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Morphological classification is carried out by correlating results of several human classifiers. Our purpose is to examine the statistical properties of color indices, scale lengths, and concentration indices as functions of morphology for the SDSS photometric system. We find that u′-g′, g′-r′, and r′-i′ colors of SDSS galaxies match well with those expected from the synthetic calculation of spectroscopic energy distribution of template galaxies and with those transformed from UBVRCIC color data of nearby galaxies. The agreement is somewhat poor, however, for the i′-z′ color band, with a discrepancy of 0.1–0.2 mag. With the aid of the relation between surface brightness and radius obtained by Kent in 1985, we estimate the averages of the effective radius of early-type galaxies and the scale length of exponential disks both to be 2.6 kpc for L* galaxies. We find that the half-light radius of galaxies depends slightly on the color bands, consistent with the expected distribution of star-forming regions for late-type galaxies and with the known color gradient for early-type galaxies. We also show that the (inverse) concentration index, defined by the ratio of the half-light Petrosian radius to the 90% light Petrosian radius, correlates tightly with the morphological type; this index allows us to classify galaxies into early (E/S0) and late (spiral and irregular) types, allowing for a 15%–20% contamination from the opposite class compared with eye-classified morphology.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change

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Citations in the corpus

Stellar and dynamical masses of ellipticals in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2003, background): “• Rp,90/Rp,50 > 2.6 (Shimasaku et al. 2001): Elliptical galaxies have intensity profiles that are more concentrated than spirals, allowing one to separate them on the basis of a concentration parameter, Rp,90/Rp,50.”
Star formation in close pairs selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2004, methodology): “For the purpose of removing early-type systems, we exclude all galaxies with a concentration index less than 0.375, larger than the 0.33 value proposed by Shimasaku et al. (2001).”
The Broadband Optical Properties of Galaxies with Redshifts 0.02 < z < 0.22 (2002, unknown): “This situation is meant to be similar to the conditions under which galaxies were observed by Shimasaku et al. (2001) and Strateva et al. (2001), who observed large, bright galaxies less affected by seeing than those in the SDSS main sample.”
Distributions of Galaxy Spectral Types in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2004, background): “…the color of a galaxy, the different sub-populations we obtain should relate to the color separation found in the SDSS EDR galaxies (Strateva et al. 2001) in which the bimodal u∗ − r∗ color distribution corresponds to early- (E, S0 and Sa) and late- (Sb, Sc and Irr) types (Shimasaku et al. 2001).”
Galaxy Evolution Explorer Ultraviolet Color-Magnitude Relations and Evidence of Recent Star Formation in Early-Type Galaxies (2004, unknown): “J, Finkbeiner, D. P., & Davis, M. 1998, ApJ, 500, 525 Schiminovich, D., van Gorkom, J. H., van der Hulst, J. M., & Kasow, S. 1994, ApJ, 423, L101 Shimasaku et al. 2001 AJ, 122, 1238 Stanford, S., Eisenhardt, P., & Dickinson, M. 1998, ApJ, 492, 461 5 van Dokkum, P. G., Franx, M., Fabricant, D.,…”
Quantifying the Bimodal Color-Magnitude Distribution of Galaxies (2003, background): “…can safely assume that the red and blue distributions, described in this paper, correspond in general to the traditional morphological definitions of early and late types because of the well-known color-morphology relations (e.g. Roberts & Haynes 1994; Shimasaku et al. 2001; Blanton et al. 2003c).”
The dependence of star formation history and internal structure on stellar mass for 105 low‐redshift galaxies (2002, methodology): “Concentration indices: In order to be consistent with previous work (Blanton et al 2001; Strateva et al 2001; Shimasaku et al 2001) we define the concentration index C as the ratio R90/R50, where R90 and R50 are the radii enclosing 90% and 50% of the Petrosian r-band luminosity of the galaxy.”
The correlation of star formation quenching with internal galaxy properties and environment (2008, methodology): “Although we have only rough morphological information for SDSS, we make use of a standard cut in concentration index (C ≡ r90/r50) to coarsely divide our sample into early- and late-type galaxies (early types have C > 2.6; Shimasaku et al. 2001; Strateva et al. 2001).”
Optical and Radio Properties of Extragalactic Sources Observed by the FIRST Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2002, methodology): “The distribution of galaxies in SDSS color-color space has been studied by Shimasaku et al. (2001) and S01.”
The Environment of Active Galactic Nuclei in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2003, methodology): “To study the fraction of early–type galaxies with an AGN, we can not use Cin < 0.4 as this sample is severely contaminated by late–type galaxies (see Gomez et al. 2003; Shimasaku et al. 2001; Strateva et al. 2001).”
IMPROVED AND QUALITY-ASSESSED EMISSION AND ABSORPTION LINE MEASUREMENTS IN SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY GALAXIES (2011, background): “…law rather than by an exponential profile, above 0.95 (see also Schawinski et al. 2007) and values for the concentration index Cr (Cr = r90/r50 where r90 and r50 are the radii containing 90 and 50% of the light, respectively) above 2.6 (see also Shimasaku et al. 2001; Strateva et al. 2001).”
Color Separation of Galaxy Types in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data (2001, methodology): “Shimasaku et al. (2001) recommend a different separator for an early-to-late cut at SO/Sa.”
The Luminosity Function of Morphologically Classified Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2002, background): “Shimasaku et al. (2001) report that this C parameter shows the strongest correlation with visually-classified morphology among simple photometrically-defined parameters (see also, Doi, Fukugita & Okamura 1993; Abraham et al. 1994; Blanton et al. 2001; Strateva et al. 2001; Bernardi et al. 2002b).”
COLD GASS, an IRAM legacy survey of molecular gas in massive galaxies – I. Relations between H2, H i, stellar content and structural properties (2011, result): “We note that this critical value of concentration index (C = 2.6) corresponds to the observed transition between late- and early-type galaxies (e.g. Shimasaku et al. 2001; Nakamura et al. 2003; Weinmann et al. 2009).”
A Galaxy Photometric Redshift Catalog for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 6 (2007, background): “…index, while late-type spirals, with quasiexponential light profiles, typically have higher values of c. Previous studies (Morgan 1958; Shimasaku et al. 2001; Yamauchi et al. 2005; Park & Choi 2005) have shown that the concentration parameter correlates well with galaxy morphological…”
The Optical and Near-Infrared Properties of Galaxies. I. Luminosity and Stellar Mass Functions (2003, background): “This is motivated by the work of Strateva et al. (2001) and Shimasaku et al. (2001), who find a scattered but reasonable correlation between qualitative morphological classifications andcr .”
Environmental effects on satellite galaxies: the link between concentration, size and colour profile (2008, result): “Using Ccut = 3 has also been suggested by Shimasaku et al. (2001) and is slightly higher than the cut used for discriminating early and late type galaxies in most other studies. c© 2008 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000”
The size distribution of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2003, background): “The concentration index c, defined as c ≡ R90/R50, is found to be correlated with galaxy morphological type (Shimasaku et al. 2001; Strateva et al. 2001; Nakamura et al. 2003).”