Gaia Data Release 3: Surface brightness profiles of galaxies and host galaxies of quasars

Abstract

Since July 2014, the Gaia space mission has been continuously scanning the sky and observing the extragalactic Universe with unprecedented spatial resolution in the optical domain ($\sim$ 180 mas by the end of the mission). Gaia provides an opportunity to study the morphology of the galaxies of the local Universe (z<0.45) with much higher resolution than has ever been attained from the ground. It also allows us to provide the first morphological all-sky space catalogue of nearby galaxies and galaxies that host quasars in the visible spectrum. We present the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium CU4-Surface Brightness Profile fitting pipeline, which aims to recover the light profile of nearby galaxies and galaxies hosting quasars. The pipeline uses a direct model based on the Radon transform to measure the two-dimensional surface brightness profile of the extended sources. It simulates a large set of 2D light profiles and iteratively looks for the one that best reproduces the 1D observations by means of a Bayesian exploration of the parameters space. We also present our method for setting up the input lists of galaxies and quasars to be processed. We successfully analysed 1\,103\,691 known quasars and detected a host galaxy around 64\,498 of them ($\sim$6\%). We publish the surface brightness profiles of the host for a subset of 15\,867 quasars with robust solutions. The distribution of the Sérsic index describing the light profile of the host galaxies peaks at $\sim$ 0.8 with a mean value of $\sim$ 1.9, indicating that these galaxies hosting a quasar are consistent with disc-like galaxies. The pipeline also analysed 940\,887 galaxies with both a \sersic and a de Vaucouleurs profile and derived robust solutions for 914\,837 of them. The distribution of the Sérsic indices confirms that \gaia mostly detects elliptical galaxies and that very few discs are measured.

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Gaia Data Release 3: Summary of the content and survey properties
• Gaia Data Release 3: Astrophysical parameters inference system (Apsis) I -- methods and content overview
• Gaia Data Release 3: Catalogue Validation
• Gaia Data Release 3: Apsis II -- Stellar Parameters
• Gaia Data Release 3: All-sky classification of 12.4 million variable sources into 25 classes
• Gaia Data Release 3: The extragalactic content
• Quaia, the Gaia-unWISE Quasar Catalog: An All-Sky Spectroscopic Quasar Sample
• Gaia Data Release 3: Gaia scan-angle dependent signals and spurious periods
• Gaia Focused Product Release: A catalogue of sources around quasars to search for strongly lensed quasars
• The NEMESIS Catalogue of Young Stellar Objects for the Orion Star Formation Complex. I. General description of data curation