paper

The Link Between Morphology and Structure of Brightest Cluster Galaxies: Automatic Identification of cDs

arXiv:1501.06352 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stv190

Abstract

We study a large sample of 625 low-redshift brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) and link their morphologies to their structural properties. We derive visual morphologies and find that ~57% of the BCGs are cD galaxies, ~13% are ellipticals, and ~21% belong to the intermediate classes mostly between E and cD. There is a continuous distribution in the properties of the BCG's envelopes, ranging from undetected (E class) to clearly detected (cD class), with intermediate classes (E/cD and cD/E) showing the increasing degrees of the envelope presence. A minority (~7%) of BCGs have disk morphologies, with spirals and S0s in similar proportions, and the rest (~2%) are mergers. After carefully fitting the galaxies light distributions by using one-component (Sersic) and two-component (Sersic+Exponential) models, we find a clear link between the BCGs morphologies and their structures and conclude that a combination of the best-fit parameters derived from the fits can be used to separate cD galaxies from non-cD BCGs. In particular, cDs and non-cDs show very different distributions in the -- plane, where is the effective radius and (the residual flux fraction) measures the proportion of the galaxy flux present in the residual images after subtracting the models. In general, cDs have larger and values than ellipticals. Therefore we find, in a statistically robust way, a boundary separating cD and non-cD BCGs in this parameter space. BCGs with cD morphology can be selected with reasonably high completeness (~75%) and low contamination (~20%). This automatic and objective technique can be applied to any current or future BCG sample with good quality images.

18 pages, 14 figures. Accepted by MNRAS

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