Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal, 1(691), p. 394-406, 2009

DOI: 10.1088/0004-637x/691/1/394

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

The intrinsic properties of SDSS galaxies

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Red circle
Preprint: archiving forbidden
Red circle
Postprint: archiving forbidden
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

The observed properties of galaxies vary with inclination; for most applications we would rather have properties that are independent of inclination, or intrinsic properties. One way to determine inclination corrections is to consider a large sample of galaxies, study how the observed properties of these galaxies depend on inclination, and then remove this dependence to recover the intrinsic properties. We perform such an analysis for galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which have been matched to galaxies from the Two Micron All Sky Survey. We determine inclination corrections for these galaxies as a function of galaxy luminosity and the Sérsic index. In the g band these corrections reach as high as 1.2 mag and have a median value of 0.3 mag for all galaxies in our sample. We find that the corrections show little dependence on galaxy luminosity, except in the u band, but are strongly dependent on galaxy Sérsic index. We find that the ratio of red-to-blue galaxies changes from 1:1 to 1:2 when going from observed to intrinsic colors for galaxies in the range –22.75 < MK < –17.75. We also discuss how survey completeness and photometric redshifts should be determined when taking into account that observed and intrinsic properties differ. Finally, we examine whether previous determinations of stellar mass give an intrinsic quantity or one that depends on galaxy inclination.