Projection effects on the FP thickness: a Monte-Carlo exploration

Abstract

We study the contribution of projection effects to the intrinsic thickness of the Fundamental Plane (FP) of elliptical galaxies. The Monte-Carlo mapping technique between model properties and observed quantities, introduced by Bertin, Ciotti, and Del Principe (2002), is extended to oblate, two-integrals galaxy models, with non-homologous density profiles, adjustable flattening, variable amount of ordered rotational support, and for which all the relevant projected dynamical quantities can be expressed in fully analytical way. In agreement with previous works, it is found that projection effects move models not exactly parallel to the edge-on FP, by an amount that can be as large as the observed FP thickness. The statistical contribution of projection effects to the FP thickness is however marginal, and the estimated physical FP rms thickness is ~90% of the observed one (when corrected for measurement errors).

16 pages, 10 figures (figs. 1,2,3,4 color figures, figs. 7, 10 low resolution figures), accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics

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Cited by in corpus (10)

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• The evolution of early-type galaxies at z~1 from the K20 survey
• Galactic cannibalism in the galaxy cluster C0337-2522 at z=0.59
• The scaling relations of galaxy clusters and their dark matter halos
• A Wide Area Survey for High-redshift Massive Galaxies. II. Near-infrared Spectroscopy of BzK-selected Massive Star-forming Galaxies
• A simple method to construct exact density-potential pairs from a homeoidal expansion
• The Effects of Galaxy Shape and Rotation on the X-ray Haloes of Early-Type Galaxies
• The contribution of rotational velocity to the FP of elliptical galaxies
• Jeans modeling of axisymmetric galaxies with multiple stellar populations
• Hydrostatic models for the rotation of extra-planar gas in disk galaxies