• DOI:10.1086/375528
• Corpus ID: 67803622

The Broadband Optical Properties of Galaxies with Redshifts 0.02 < z < 0.22

@article{Blanton2003TheBO,
  title={The Broadband Optical Properties of Galaxies with Redshifts 0.02 < z < 0.22},
  author={Michael R. Blanton and David W. Hogg and Neta A. Bahcall and Ivan K. Baldry and Jonathan Brinkmann and Istv{\'a}n Csabai and Daniel J. Eisenstein and Masataka Fukugita and James E. Gunn and Željko Ivezi{\'c} and Donald Q. Lamb and Robert H. Lupton and Jon Loveday and Jeffrey A. Munn and Robert C. Nichol and Sadanori Okamura and David J. Schlegel and Kazuhiro Shimasaku and Michael A. Strauss and Michael S. E. Vogeley and David H. Weinberg},
  journal={The Astrophysical Journal},
  year={2003},
  volume={594},
  pages={186 - 207}
}

• M. Blanton, D. Hogg, +18 authors D. Weinberg
• Published 23 September 2002
• Physics
• The Astrophysical Journal

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 arcsec2 [the notation zb 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.