Morphological properties of isolated galaxies vs. isolation criteria

• Published in: Astronomische Nachrichten Vol. 330; no. 9-10; pp. 1004 - 1009
• Main Authors: Vavilova, I.B., Melnyk, O.V., Elyiv, A.A.
• Format: Journal Article Web Resource
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin WILEY-VCH Verlag 01-12-2009; WILEY‐VCH Verlag; Wiley
• Subjects: Aérospatiale, astronomie & astrophysique; dark matter; galaxies: structure; methods: statistical; Physical, chemical, mathematical & earth Sciences; Physique, chimie, mathématiques & sciences de la terre; Space science, astronomy & astrophysics; surveys
• ISSN: 0004-6337; 1521-3994; 1521-3994
• DOI: 10.1002/asna.200911281

We studied the morphological properties of isolated galaxies samples in dependence on the isolation parameter and properties of primary catalogs. With this aim we identified the samples of single and isolated galaxies from SDSS DR5 (Single and QIsol) with the 3D Voronoi tessellation method (Elyiv et al. 2009). We found that in comparison with other samples of isolated galaxies, the QIsol sample contains an excess of late‐type galaxies, especially with a low luminosity and BCG/Im/Irr morphology. We also showed that the fractions of early type galaxies in QIsol SDSS DR5 sample and samples 2MIG (Karachentseva et al. 2010) and CIG (Karachentseva et al. 1973; Hernandez‐Toledo et al. 2008) are in a good agreement (16–19 %), but Allam's (Allam et al. 2005) and Prada's (Prada et al. 2003) SDSS DR1 samples show a higher excess of the early type galaxies that can be explained by the selection criteria and morphology definition method. We found a weak relation between isolation parameter and color index for the Single sample that may indicate that even in the low dense environment the morphology density relation is observed. We conclude that morphological properties of the resulting sample of isolated galaxies are highly dependent on the primary catalogue from which the galaxies were selected. Moreover, the selection criterion is also important but plays a secondary role in the resulting morphological content, color indices distribution and other parameters of the isolated galaxy samples. Only four galaxies are common in the 2MIG, QIsol, and CIG samples, namely UGC5184, UGC6121, UGC8495, and UGC9598, that allows to consider them as really most isolated galaxies (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)