Identification and Properties of Isolated Field Elliptical Galaxies from CFHTLS-W1

Abstract

We present a catalogue of isolated field elliptical (IfE) galaxies drawn from the W1 field of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS). 228 IfEs were identified from a flux-limited (r<21.8) galaxy catalogue which corresponds to a density of 3 IfE/sq.deg. For comparison we consider a sample of elliptical galaxies living in dense environments, based on identification of the brightest cluster galaxies (BGCs) in the same survey. Using the same dataset for the comparison sample ensures a uniform selection, including in the redshift range as IfEs (i.e. 0.1 < z < 0.9). A comparison of elliptical galaxies in different environments reveals that IfEs and BCGs have similar behaviours in their colours, star formation activities, and scaling relations of mass-size and size-luminosity. IfEs and BCGs have similar slopes in the scaling relations with respect to cluster ellipticals within the $-24\le M_r\le -22$ magnitude and $10.2<\text{log}({\text{M}}_{\ast }/{\text{M}}_{\odot })\le 12.0$ mass ranges. Three IfEs identified in this study can be associated with fossil groups found in the same survey area which gives clues for future studies.

23 pages, 18 figures, 10 tables, accepted for publication in PASA

References in corpus (12)

• Cosmic Star Formation History
• The hierarchical formation of the brightest cluster galaxies
• The Evolution of Galaxy Structure over Cosmic Time
• How special are Brightest Group and Cluster Galaxies?
• A GMBCG Galaxy Cluster Catalog of 55,424 Rich Clusters from SDSS DR7
• The luminosities, sizes and velocity dispersions of Brightest Cluster Galaxies: Implications for formation history
• Catalogues of isolated galaxies, isolated pairs, and isolated triplets in the local Universe
• Scaling relations in fossil galaxy groups
• Evidence for recent star formation in BCGs: a correspondence between blue cores and UV excess
• A morphology revaluation of galaxies in common from the Catalog of Isolated Galaxies and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (DR6)
• Accelerated galaxy growth and environmental quenching in a protocluster at z=3.24
• AMICO galaxy clusters in KiDS-DR3: galaxy population properties and their redshift dependence

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Structural Analysis of Brightest Cluster Galaxies in Poor and Rich Clusters