2003/12/20 by Brian Lee, B. C. Lee, S. Allam +34 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/382236
published as Astron.J. 127 (2004) 1811 · 61 pages, 15 figures (Figs. 13, 14, 15 are jpegs). Atlas of compact groups (Fig. 16) is available at http://home.fnal.gov/~sallam/LeeCG/ . Accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journal
arxiv created 2003/12/20 · openalex publication_date 2004/04/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Compact groups (CGs) of galaxies—relatively poor groups of galaxies in which the typical separations between members is of the order of a galaxy diameter—offer an exceptional laboratory for the study of dense galactic environments with short (<1 Gyr) dynamical timescales. We present an objectively defined catalog of CGs in 153 deg 2 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Early Data Release. To identify CGs, we applied a modified version of Hickson's criteria of 1982 aimed at finding the highest-density CGs and thus reducing the number of chance alignments. Our catalog contains 175 CGs down to a limiting galaxy magnitude of r * = 21. The resulting catalog has a median depth of z med ≈ 0.13, substantially deeper than previous CG catalogs. Since the SDSS will eventually image up to one-quarter of the celestial sphere, we expect our final catalog, based on the completed SDSS, will contain on the order of 5000–10,000 CGs. This catalog will be useful for conducting studies of the general characteristics of CGs, their environments, and their component galaxies.