Color Separation of Galaxy Types in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data

Details Color Separation of Galaxy Types in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data Color Separation of Galaxy Types in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data

2001-07-11

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0107201v1

Astron.J. 122 (2001) 1861-1874

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

42 pages, 10 PostScript figures, AJ accepted (October 2001), for higher quality figures go to http://www.astro.princeton.edu

Scientific paper

10.1086/323301

We study the optical colors of 147,920 galaxies brighter than g* = 21, observed in five bands by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) over ~100 sq. deg. of high Galactic latitude sky along the Celestial Equator. The distribution of galaxies in the g*-r* vs. u*-g* color--color diagram is strongly bimodal, with an optimal color separator of u*-r* = 2.22. We use visual morphology and spectral classification of subsamples of 287 and 500 galaxies respectively, to show that the two peaks correspond roughly to early (E, S0, Sa) and late (Sb, Sc, Irr) type galaxies, as expected from their different stellar populations. We also find that the colors of galaxies are correlated with their radial profiles, as measured by the concentration index and by the likelihoods of exponential and de Vaucouleurs' profile fits. While it is well known that late type galaxies are bluer than early type galaxies, this is the first detection of a local minimum in their color distribution. In all SDSS bands, the counts vs. apparent magnitude relations for the two color types are significantly different, and indicate that the fraction of blue galaxies increases towards the faint end.

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