The intrinsic dispersion in the Faber-Jackson relation for early-type galaxies as function of the mass and redshift

Abstract

Context. It has been reported that the intrinsic dispersion at constant magnitude in the structural relations of early-type galaxies is a useful tool to study the universality of these structural relations, that is to say, to study whether the structural relations depend on luminosity, wavelength, redshift, and/or environment. Aims. We study the intrinsic dispersion at approximately constant magnitude in the Faber-Jackson relation as a function of luminosity, mass, and redshift. Methods. We use a sample of approximately 90 000 early-type galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-DR7) spanning a magnitude range of 7 mag in both g and r filters. We calculate the intrinsic dispersion in the Faber-Jackson relation at approximately constant magnitude and compare this at different luminosities, masses, and redshifts. Results. The main results are the following: i) the intrinsic dispersion in the Faber-Jackson relation depends on the luminosity, mass, and redshift; ii) the distribution for brighter and more massive galaxies has smaller intrinsic dispersion than that for fainter and less massive galaxies; iii) the distribution of bright and massive galaxies at higher redshift has smaller intrinsic dispersion than similar galaxies at low redshift. Conclusions. Comparisons of the results found in this work with recent studies from the literature make us conclude that the intrinsic dispersion in the Faber-Jackson relation could depend on the history of galaxies, in other words, the intrinsic dispersion could depend on the number and nature of transformation events that have affected the galaxies during their life times, such as collapse, accretion, interaction, and merging.

Tomography of the Ie-Re and L-Sigma Planes

“…The huge difference in richness of the sub-samples mirrors the difficulty in measuring the velocity dispersion compared to surface brightness and half-light radii. Nevertheless, this bias is less of a problem in our analysis because our log(L) − log(σ) closely agrees with the one we would derive from the log(M) − log(σ) relationship of [33] obtained from a much richer sample of about 90,000 ETGs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-DR7) spanning a magnitude range of 7 mag in both g and r filters. Their procedure requires either the mass derived from a mass-luminosity relation or the mass estimated from the VT.…”

“…Only quite recently, the claim that a different slope exists for the FJ of bright and faint ETGs (∼4 for bright galaxies to ∼2.7 for faint objects) appeared in literature (see, e.g., [32], among others). Nigoche-Netro et al [33] confirmed the different slopes of the FJ relation in different magnitude ranges and suggested that its intrinsic dispersion depends on the history of galaxies, i.e., on the number and nature of transformations that have affected the galaxies along their lifetimes (collapse, accretion, interaction and merging).…”

THE SCALING OF STELLAR MASS AND CENTRAL STELLAR VELOCITY DISPERSION FOR QUIESCENT GALAXIES AT z < 0.7

“…Figure 5 shows that the SDSS M * σ relation exhibits clear evidence of a break in the power law 5 http://cosmo.nyu.edu/blanton/vagc/kcorrect.html (c.f. Nigoche-Netro et al 2011;Cappellari et al 2013;Cappellari 2016). We fit the data with…”

Past, Present, and Future of the Scaling Relations of Galaxies and Active Galactic Nuclei

“…We can better say that it is a sort of 2D version of the FP 1 . The deep analysis of Nigoche-Netro et al (2011) concluded that the scatter of the FJ depends on the history of galaxies, i.e. on the number and nature of the transformations that have affected the galaxies along their life times (collapse, accretion, interaction, and merging).…”