1306.0285 (Christoph Saulder et al.)

Calibrating the fundamental plane with SDSS DR8 data    [PDF]

Christoph Saulder, Steffen Mieske, Werner W. Zeilinger, Igor V. Chilingarian

In this paper, we present a calibration of the fundamental plane using SDSS Data Release 8. We analyse about 93000 elliptical galaxies up to z<0.2, the largest sample used for the calibration of the fundamental plane so far. We incorporate up-to-date K-corrections and use GalaxyZoo data for the classification of the galaxies in our sample. We derive independent fundamental plane fits in all five Sloan filters u, g, r, i, z. A direct fit using a volume weighted least squares method is applied to obtain the coefficients of the fundamental plane, which implicitly corrects for the Malmquist bias. We achieve an accuracy of 15% for the fundamental plane as a distance indicator. We provide a detailed discussion on the calibrations and their influence on the resulting fits. These re-calibrated fundamental plane relations form a well-suited anchor for large-scale peculiar velocity studies in the nearby universe. Aside from the fundamental plane, we discuss the redshift distribution of the elliptical galaxies, and their global parameters.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0285