The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. I. Introduction to the Survey

By P. Côté, J. Blakeslee, L. Ferrarese, A. Jord'an, S. Mei, D. Merritt, Milos Milosavljevic, E. Peng, J. Tonry, M. West. 2004

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Virgo Cluster is the dominant mass concentration in the Local Supercluster and the largest collection of elliptical and lenticular galaxies in the nearby universe. In this paper, we present an introduction to the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey: a program to image, in the F475W and F850LP bandpasses (≈Sloan g and z), 100 early-type galaxies in the Virgo Cluster using the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. We describe the selection of the program galaxies and their ensemble properties, the choice of filters, the field placement and orientation, the limiting magnitudes of the survey, coordinated parallel observations of 100 "intergalactic" fields with WFPC2, and supporting ground-based spectroscopic observations of the program galaxies. In terms of depth, spatial resolution, sample size, and homogeneity, this represents the most comprehensive imaging survey to date of early-type galaxies in a cluster environment. We briefly describe the main scientific goals of the survey, which include the measurement of luminosities, metallicities, ages, and structural parameters for the many thousands of globular clusters associated with these galaxies, a high-resolution isophotal analysis of galaxies spanning a factor of ∼450 in luminosity and sharing a common environment, the measurement of accurate distances for the full sample of galaxies using the method of surface brightness fluctuations, and a determination of the three-dimensional structure of Virgo itself.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fe2e2a1b43fcc43265c4ca491217e372150f0f12

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. D. Merritt
2. E. Peng
3. L. Ferrarese
4. P. Côté
5. M. Cappellari
6. J. Blakeslee
7. J. Tonry
8. L. Simard

In Instrumentation

1. M. Cappellari
2. J. Kormendy
3. M. Sarzi
4. M. Bureau
5. Eric Emsellem
6. R. Bender
7. Roger Davies
8. P. de Zeeuw

Citations in the corpus

• Ultradiffuse galaxies: the high-spin tail of the abundant dwarf galaxy population (2016, methodology): “…of the population, with Nbe = 10 3 corresponding to a virial mass of log10(M c 200/M ) = (14.8 ± 0.2) for galaxies with M/Lr = (3 ± 1)M /L , in good agreement with the mass of Virgo within the wide area covered by the Extended Virgo Cluster Catalog (e.g., Fouqué et al. 2001; Côté et al. 2004).”
• Extragalactic Globular Clusters and Galaxy Formation (2006, methodology): “Peng et al. (2006b) used deeper imaging from the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey and found color bimodality in nearly all of the massive S0s in their sample.”
• STRUCTURE AND FORMATION OF ELLIPTICAL AND SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES (2008, methodology): “Structure and Formation of Elliptical and Spheroidal Galaxies 11 The ACS Virgo cluster survey by Côté et al. (2004) provides high-quality, archival images of almost all of our sample galaxies.”
• Globular Cluster Systems in Brightest Cluster Galaxies: Bimodal Metallicity Distributions and the Nature of the High-Luminosity Clusters (2005, background): “An excellent prospect for doing such a test would be with the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey (Côté et al. 2004) of a hundred normal galaxies covering a wide range of luminosities.”
• Virgo Cluster Early-Type Dwarf Galaxies with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. II. Early-Type Dwarfs with Central Star Formation (2006, result): “We point out that the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey (Côté et al. 2004) finds a much higher frequency of compact stellar nuclei in early-type galaxies than Binggeli et al. (1985) did, primarily due to the much higher resolution of space-based studies as compared to ground-based ones (Côté 2005).”
• The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. VII. Resolving the Connection between Globular Clusters and Ultracompact Dwarf Galaxies (2005, methodology): “Selection from the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey Paper I gives a detailed description of the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey (GO-9401): a program to image, in two widely separated bandpasses (F475W Sloan g and F850LP Sloan z), 100 early-type members of the Virgo Cluster using the ACS instrument (Ford et al. 199”
• Ejection of Supermassive Black Holes from Galaxy Cores (2007, methodology): “We adopt the scaling relations derived from the ACS Virgo cluster survey of Côté et al. (2004) betweenRe and absolute blue magnitudeMB for early-type galaxies.”
• The SAURON project - IV. The mass-to-light ratio, the virial mass estimator and the Fundamental Plane of elliptical and lenticular galaxies (2005, methodology): “Progress on the investigation of the(M/L)–σ relation can be made using: (i) larger galaxy samples, to reliably determine the intrinsic scatter and the significance of the apparent conection between the dynamics and the dark matter content in galaxies; (ii) more accurate distances (e.g. using the SBF”
• A Fundamental Relation between Compact Stellar Nuclei, Supermassive Black Holes, and Their Host Galaxies (2006, methodology): “In this Letter, we explore the connection between compact stellar nuclei, SBHs and their host galaxies by com- bining HST imaging for 100 early-type galaxies from the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey (ACSVCS; Côté et al. 2004) with new ground-based long-slit spectra for the brightest 69 of these galaxies.”
• THE ACS FORNAX CLUSTER SURVEY. V. MEASUREMENT AND RECALIBRATION OF SURFACE BRIGHTNESS FLUCTUATIONS AND A PRECISE VALUE OF THE FORNAX–VIRGO RELATIVE DISTANCE (2009, methodology): “…spacebased imager has been most spectacularly demonstrated by its application in the F850LP bandpass (hereafterz850) as part of the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey (ACSVCS; Côté et al. 2004, hereafter ACSVCS-I), a two-band imaging survey of 100 early-type galaxies in the Virgo cluster with the ACS/WFC.”
• THE ACS VIRGO CLUSTER SURVEY XVI. SELECTION PROCEDURE AND CATALOGS OF GLOBULAR CLUSTER CANDIDATES (2008, methodology): “In the eleventh Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observing cycle, we initiated the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Virgo Cluster Survey (ACSVCS; Côté et al. 2004; hereafter Paper I), a program to acquire F475W (≈ SDSS g) and F850LP (≈ SDSS z) images for 100 early-type members of Virgo using the ACS…”
• Globular Clusters in Virgo Ellipticals: Unexpected Results for Giants and Dwarfs from Advanced Camera for Surveys Imaging (2005, methodology): “All data were taken as part of the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey (Côté et al. 2004), which includes both ellipticals and S0s.”
• The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. XII. The Luminosity Function of Globular Clusters in Early-Type Galaxies (2007, methodology): “The first column of Table 1 is the galaxy ID in the Virgo Cluster Catalogue (VCC: Binggeli, Sandage & Tammann 1985; see Table 1 in Côté et al. 2004 for NGC and Messier equivalents).”
• Masses and scaling relations for nuclear star clusters, and their co-existence with central black holes (2016, unknown): “…NSC photometry in early-type galaxies is collected from two galaxy cluster surveys conducted with with HST/ACS - the Virgo Cluster Survey (ACSVCS, Côté et al. 2004) with photometry for 56 NSCs (Côté et al. 2006) and the Fornax Cluster Survey (ACSFCS, Jordán et al. 2007) with measurements of 31…”
• Gravitational waves from scattering of stellar-mass black holes in galactic nuclei (2008, background): “In fact, Merritt, Mikkola & Szell (2007) determined the relaxation times for galaxies in the ACS Virgo Survey (Côté et al. 2004), and found a relatively tight correlation, however, there was still significant scatter above the mean by about an order of magnitude.”
• The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. X. Half-Light Radii of Globular Clusters in Early-Type Galaxies: Environmental Dependencies and a Standard Ruler for Distance Estimation (2005, methodology): “…are taken to be the absolute blue magnitude of the host galaxy, MB, and its corresponding color, (g − z)gal (Binggeli, Sandage & Tammann 1985; Côté et al. 2004; Ferrarese et al. 2005).14 We use our SBF distance moduli (Mei et al. 2005bc) to calculate absolute magnitudes on a…”
• THE NEXT GENERATION VIRGO CLUSTER SURVEY (NGVS). I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SURVEY (2012, methodology): “An unexpected result to have emerged from HST imaging surveys of nearby galaxies during the past decade, particularly the ACSVCS and ACSFCS (Côté et al. 2004, 2007; Jordán et al. 2007), is the discovery that most intermediate- and low-mass galaxies contain structurally distinct stellar…”
• The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. XIII. SBF Distance Catalog and the Three-dimensional Structure of the Virgo Cluster (2007, methodology): “The columns of this table record: (1): ID number from Coté et al. (2004); (2): VCC number from Binggeli et al. (1985); (3): Galaxy (g475 − z850)0 color over the same range of annuli used for the SBF measurements (see Paper V); (4): SBF magnitude m850; (5): Distance modulus obtained using the…”