The K-selected Butcher-Oemler Effect

Abstract

[abridged] We investigate the Butcher-Oemler effect in a sample of K-selected galaxies in 33 clusters at 0.15 < z < 0.92. We attempt to duplicate the original Butcher-Oemler analysis as closely as possible given the characteristics of our data. We find that the infrared selected blue fractions are lower than those measured in the optical and that the trend with redshift is much weaker. Comparison with optical data in clusters in common with Butcher & Oemler (1984) shows that infrared selection is the primary difference between our study and optically selected samples. We suggest that the Butcher-Oemler effect is in large part due to a population of star-forming low mass galaxies which will evolve into dwarf galaxies. These early results point to the need for larger and deeper infrared samples of cluster galaxies to address this issue

37 pages, 19 figures, ApJ accepted (vol 598 n1)

References in corpus (6)

• Evolution since z = 0.5 of the Morphology-Density relation for Clusters of Galaxies
• The Evolution of Early-Type Galaxies in Distant Clusters
• The life-cycle of star formation in distant clusters
• The K Band Luminosity Function in Galaxy Clusters to z ~ 1
• Is the Butcher-Oemler effect a function of the cluster redshift ?
• Optical and Near-Infrared Photometry of Distant Galaxy Clusters

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Reasoning From Fossils: Learning From the Local Black Hole Population About the Evolution of Quasars
• Ks-band luminosity function of the z=1.237 cluster of galaxies RDCS J1252.9-2927