A Photometric Study of Brightest Cluster Galaxies at z 1

Mathematics – Logic

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs) are amongst the most luminous galaxies in the universe and occupy special regions in space near the centers of the gravitational potential of clusters of galaxies. BCGs thus offer a unique probe of galaxy formation processes across substantial cosmological timescales. We present a photometric analysis of 11 high redshift (0.8 < z < 1.4) BCGs observed with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). After accounting for passive stellar evolution, our BCGs are marginally underluminous when compared to a large, homogeneously selected sample of low-z BCGs. The high-z BCGs also exhibit both a significantly lower luminosity contrast with the 2nd-ranked galaxy (m2 - m1) and a substantially higher occurrence of non-elliptical morphologies than their current epoch counterparts. These results suggest that significant mass augmentation via mergers is likely as these BCGs evolve. Finally, our results show that the observed low-z correlation between metric BCG luminosity and the logarithmic slope of the curve of growth (α) is already in place by z = 1.4. With this small high-z sample, our conclusions must be considered very preliminary but appear consistent with other recent observations showing significant growth in the stellar mass in early-type galaxies over the past 8 Gyr. ACS was developed under NASA contract NAS532865, and this research was supported by NASA grant NAG57697.

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