Evolution of the colour-magnitude relation of early-type galaxies in distant clusters

Details Evolution of the colour-magnitude relation of early-type galaxies in distant clusters Evolution of the colour-magnitude relation of early-type galaxies in distant clusters

1998-02-18

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9802245v1

Astron.Astrophys. 334 (1998) 99-109

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

13 pages, 5 postscript figures, Latex (A&A format), uses epsf.sty and aa.cls, Accepted for publication in A&A Main Jounal

Scientific paper

We present a thorough quantitative analysis of the evolution of the colour-magnitude relation for early-type galaxies in 17 distant clusters with redshifts 0.31 < z < 1.27 using the Kodama & Arimoto (1997) evolutionary model for elliptical galaxies. The model is calibrated to reproduce the colour- magnitude relation for Coma ellipticals at z ~ 0 and gives the evolution of the slope and zero-point as a function of redshift. We find no significant differences between the colour-magnitude relations of the clusters in our sample. The slopes can be reproduced by a single model sequence in which all elliptical galaxies are assumed to be equally old (the maximum age difference allowed for the brightest 3 magnitudes is only 1 Gyr) and to have mean stellar metallicities which vary as a function of galaxy luminosity. The zero-points of the colour-magnitude relations constrain the epoch of major star formation in early-type galaxies to z_f>2-4. This study provides two important constraints for any model of the formation of rich clusters: the uniformity of the ages of the stellar populations in the early-type galaxies and the universality of the metallicity sequence of these galaxies as a function of galaxy mass.

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