Fossil Groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Abstract

A search for fossil groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was performed using virtual observatory tools. A cross-match of the positions of all SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies (with r < 19 and measured spectroscopic redshifts) with sources in the ROSAT All-Sky Survey catalog resulted in a list of elliptical galaxies with extended X-ray emission (with a galaxy/ROSAT-source distance of less than 0.5 arcmin in all cases). A search for neighbors of the selected elliptical galaxies within a radius of $0.5h_{70}^{-1}$ Mpc was conducted taking into account the r-band magnitudes and spectroscopic or photometric redshifts of all objects within this area, leading to a sample of 34 candidate fossil groups. Considering this sample, the estimated space density of fossil systems is $n=(1.0\pm 0.6)\times 10^{-6}$ $h_{50}^3$ Mpc${}^{-3}$.

16 pages, accepted by AJ

References in corpus (1)

• Scaling relations in fossil galaxy groups