2002/09/23 by Michael R. Blanton, M. R. Blanton, David W. Hogg +34 · 5 citations
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Impact of Light on Environment and Health #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/375528
published as Astrophys.J.594:186,2003 · 36 pages, including 14 figures, 1 table, submitted to ApJ
arxiv created 2002/09/23 · openalex publication_date 2003/08/20 · arxiv updated 2011/07/18 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Using photometry and spectroscopy of 183,487 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we present bivariate distributions of pairs of seven galaxy properties: four optical colors, surface brightness, radial profile shape as measured by the Sérsic index, and absolute magnitude. In addition, we present the dependence of local galaxy density (smoothed on 8 h -1 Mpc scales) on all of these properties. Several classic, well-known relations among galaxy properties are evident at extremely high signal-to-noise ratio: the color-color relations of galaxies, the color-magnitude relations, the magnitude-surface brightness relation, and the dependence of density on color and absolute magnitude. We show that most of the i -band luminosity density in the universe is in the absolute magnitude and surface brightness ranges used: -23.5 < M < -17.0 mag and 17 < μ < 24 mag in 1 arcsec 2 [the notation z b represents the b band shifted blueward by a factor (1 + z )]. Some of the relationships between parameters, in particular the color-magnitude relations, show stronger correlations for exponential galaxies and concentrated galaxies taken separately than for all galaxies taken together. We provide a simple set of fits of the dependence of galaxy properties on luminosity for these two sets of galaxies and other quantitative details of our results.