Calibrating the fundamental plane with SDSS DR8 data
- Author(s)
- Christoph Saulder, Steffen Mieske, Werner W. Zeilinger, Igor Chilingarian
- Abstract
We present a calibration of the fundamental plane using SDSS Data Release 8. We analysed about 93 000 elliptical galaxies up to z < 0.2, the largest sample used for the calibration of the fundamental plane so far. We incorporated up-to-date K-corrections and used GalaxyZoo data to classify the galaxies in our sample. We derived independent fundamental plane fits in all five Sloan filters u, g, r, i, and z. A direct fit using a volume-weighted least-squares method was applied to obtain the coefficients of the fundamental plane, which implicitly corrects for the Malmquist bias. We achieved an accuracy of 15% for the fundamental plane as a distance indicator. We provide a detailed discussion on the calibrations and their influence on the resulting fits. These re-calibrated fundamental plane relations form a well-suited anchor for large-scale peculiar-velocity studies in the nearby universe. In addition to the fundamental plane, we discuss the redshift distribution of the elliptical galaxies and their global parameters.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Astrophysics
- External organisation(s)
- European Southern Observatory (Germany), Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Anuchin Research Institute and Museum of Anthropology
- Journal
- Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Volume
- 557
- No. of pages
- 36
- ISSN
- 0004-6361
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201321466
- Publication date
- 09-2013
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103004 Astrophysics, 103003 Astronomy
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/69ec5120-8314-4f91-b626-47f84a7dfbcf