The velocity dispersion function of early-type galaxies

The velocity dispersion function of early-type galaxies

Authors:
R. K. Sheth,
M. Bernardi,
P. L. Schechter,
S. Burles,
D. J. Eisenstein,
D. P. Finkbeiner,
J. Frieman,
D. W. Hogg,
R. H. Lupton,
D. J. Schlegel,
M. Subbarao,
K. Shimasaku,
N. A. Bahcall,
J. Brinkmann,
Z. Ivezic

Comments: 7 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to ApJ

The distribution of early-type galaxy velocity dispersions, phi(sigma), is
measured using a sample drawn from the SDSS database. Its shape differs
significantly from that which one obtains by simply using the mean correlation
between luminosity, L, and velocity dispersion, sigma, to transform the
luminosity function into a velocity function: ignoring the scatter around the
mean sigma-L relation is a bad approximation. An estimate of the contribution
from late-type galaxies is also made, which suggests that phi(sigma) is
dominated by early-type galaxies at velocities larger than ~ 200 km/s.

References and citations for this submission:

SLAC-SPIRES HEP (refers to ,
cited by, arXiv reformatted)