The Tully-Fisher relation for 25000 Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies as a function of environment

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The Tully-Fisher relation for 25000 Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies as a function of environment

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/230505

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Title: The Tully-Fisher relation for 25000 Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies as a function of environment
Author(s): Mocz, P.; Green, A.; Malacari, M.; Glazebrook, K.
Abstract: We construct Tully-Fisher relationships (TFRs) in the u, g, r, i and z bands and stellar mass TFRs for a sample of 25 698 late spiral-type galaxies (with 0.045 < z < 0.085) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and study the effects of environment on the relation. We use SDSS-measured Balmer emission line widths, vFWHM, as a proxy for disc circular velocity, vcirc. A priori, it is not clear whether we can construct accurate TFRs given the small 3 arcsec diameter of the fibres used for SDSS spectroscopic measurements. However, we show by modelling the Hα emission profile as observed through a 3 arcsec aperture that for galaxies at appropriate redshifts (z > 0.045) the fibres sample enough of the disc to obtain a linear relationship between vFWHM and vcirc, allowing us to obtain a TFR and to investigate dependence on other variables. We also develop a methodology for distinguishing between astrophysical and sample bias in the fibre TFR trends. We observe the well-known steepening of the TFR in redder bands in our sample. We divide the sample of galaxies into four equal groups using projected neighbour density (Σ) quartiles and find no significant dependence on environment, extending previous work to a wider range of environments and a much larger sample. Having demonstrated that we can construct SDSS-based TFRs is very useful for future TFR studies because of the large sample size available in the SDSS.
Publication type: Journal article
Research centre: Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies. Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
Source: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 425, no. 1 (Sep 2012), pp. 296-310
Publication year: 2012
FOR Code(s): 0201 Astronomical and Space Sciences
Keyword(s): Dynamics; Galaxy structure; Kinematics; Tully-Fisher relationship
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISSN: 0035-8711
Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.21458.x
Research Projects: Mass assembly and galaxy evolution: measuring origins in deep time, Australian Research Council grant number DP1094370
Peer reviewed