The Fundamental Plane of Early Type Galaxies in Nearby Clusters from the WINGS Database

Abstract

By exploting the data of three large surveys (WINGS, NFPS and SDSS), we present here a comparative analysis of the Fundamental Plane (FP hereafter) of the early-type galaxies (ETGs) belonging to 59 galaxy clusters in the redshift range $0.04<z<0.07$. We show that the variances of the distributions of the FP coefficients derived for the clusters in our sample are not consistent with the hypothesis of universality of the FP relation. By investigating the origin of such remarkable variances we find that, besides a couple of obvious factors, such as the adopted fitting technique and the method used to measure the photometric and kinematic variables, the coefficients of the FP are strongly influenced by a number of things, mainly related to the distribution of photometric/kinematic properties of galaxies in the particular sample under analysis. For instance, the $a$ coefficient derived for the whole sample of ETGs, turns out to decrease when faint galaxies are progressively removed from the sample, suggesting that bright and faint ETGs have systematically different FPs, likely because of different mechanisms of galaxy formation. In general, by comparing mock cluster samples with the real one, we conclude that the observed variances of the FP coefficients cannot be attributed just to statistical uncertainties. We speculate that the FP is actually a bent surface, which is approximated by different planes when different selection criteria, either chosen or induced by observations, are acting to define galaxies samples. We also find ...

51 pages, 18 figures, ApJ submitted

References in corpus (3)

• The luminosities, sizes and velocity dispersions of Brightest Cluster Galaxies: Implications for formation history
• A spectrophotometric model applied to cluster galaxies: the WINGS dataset
• The ESO-Spitzer Imaging extragalactic Survey (ESIS) I: WFI B,V,R deep observations of ELAIS-S1 and comparison to Spitzer and GALEX data

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Distance and properties of NGC 4993 as the host galaxy of a gravitational wave source, GW170817
• The 6dF Galaxy Survey: Fundamental Plane Data
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Peculiar Velocity Catalogue
• The SDSS-UKIDSS Fundamental Plane of Early-type Galaxies
• Cluster and field elliptical galaxies at z~1.3. The marginal role of the environment and the relevance of the galaxy central regions
• Structures in the fundamental plane of early-type galaxies
• The Fundamental Planes of E+A galaxies and GALEX UV-excess early-type galaxies: Revealing their intimate connection
• Minor Mergers are not enough: The importance of Major Mergers during Brightest Cluster Galaxy assembly
• Dependence of the Fundamental Plane of Early-type Galaxies on Age and Internal Structure
• A Precise Benchmark for Cluster Scaling Relations: Fundamental Plane, Mass Plane and IMF in the Coma Cluster from Dynamical Models
• A photometric analysis of Abell 1689: two-dimensional multi-structure decomposition, morphological classification, and the Fundamental Plane
• The Fundamental Plane Relation of Early-Type Galaxies: Environmental Dependence
• Morphology, color-magnitude and scaling relations of galaxies in Abell 426
• The Fundamental Plane in the hierarchical context
• The Fundamental Plane Is Not a Plane: Warped Nature of the Fundamental Plane of Early-type Galaxies and Its Implication for Galaxy Formation
• The scaling relations of galaxies back in time: the road toward virialization
• A new framework for understanding the evolution of early-type galaxies
• Intrinsic correlations of galaxy sizes in a hydrodynamical cosmological simulation
• The hyperplane of early-type galaxies: using stellar population properties to increase the precision and accuracy of the fundamental plane as a distance indicator
• Past, present and Future of the Scaling Relations of Galaxies and Active Galactic Nuclei