The Intrinsic Properties of SDSS Galaxies

Abstract

The observed properties of galaxies vary with inclination; for most applications we would rather have properties that are independent of inclination, 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 Sersic index. In the g-band these corrections reach as 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 Sersic 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 < M_K < -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.

11 pages, 12 figures submitted to ApJ

References in corpus (6)

• The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue: the B-band attenuation of bulge and disc light and the implied cosmic dust and stellar mass densities
• Star Formation and the Growth of Stellar Mass
• The Tully-Fisher Relation and Its Residuals for a Broadly Selected Sample of Galaxies
• Inclination-Dependent Extinction Effects in Disk Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• The propagation of uncertainties in stellar population synthesis modeling I: The relevance of uncertain aspects of stellar evolution and the IMF to the derived physical properties of galaxies
• Environmental Effects on Satellite Galaxies: The Link Between Concentration, Size and Colour Profile
• Structural Properties of Central Galaxies in Groups and Clusters
• Luminosity and surface brightness distribution of K-band galaxies from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey