Color-Magnitude Distribution of Face-on Nearby Galaxies in SDSS DR7

Abstract

We have analyzed the distributions in the color-magnitude diagram (CMD) of a large sample of face-on galaxies to minimize the effect of dust extinctions on galaxy color. About 300 thousand galaxies with $log(a/b)<$ 0.2 and redshift $z<0.2$ are selected from the SDSS DR7 catalog. Two methods are employed to investigate the distributions of galaxies in the CMD including 1-D Gaussian fitting to the distributions in individual magnitude bins and 2-D Gaussian mixture model (GMM) fitting to galaxies as a whole. We find that in the 1-D fitting only two Gaussians are not enough to fit galaxies with the excess present between the blue cloud and the red sequence. The fitting to this excess defines the centre of the green-valley in the local universe to be $(u-r{)}_{0.1}=-0.121M_{r,0.1}-0.061$. The fraction of blue cloud and red sequence galaxies turns over around $M_{r,0.1}\sim -20.1$ mag, corresponding to stellar mass of $3\times 10^{10}{M}_{\odot }$. For the 2-D GMM fitting, a total of four Gaussians are required, one for the blue cloud, one for the red sequence and the additional two for the green valley. The fact that two Gaussians are needed to describe the distributions of galaxies in the green valley is consistent with some models that argue for two different evolutionary paths from the blue cloud to the red sequence.

Accepted by ApJ, 9 pages, 8 figures, 1 table

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