Visibility and the selection of galaxies

Davies, Jonathan Ivor 1990. Visibility and the selection of galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 244 , pp. 8-24.

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Abstract

The visibility of inclined, two-component bulge/disk galaxies is considered. It is found that the visibility function is a sharply peaked function of the intrinsic central surface brightness of the disk, the peak of the distribution closely corresponding with the peak predicted for a face-on disk. It is shown that a characteristic surface brightness can be defined for a given catalog. Sample visibility curves are given for various galaxy selection criteria, galaxy parameters, and detector dynamic ranges. The visibility of early-type galaxies is found to be less than that of late types, so the bulge/elliptical luminosity of the universe may have been underestimated previously. The strong influence of even a small bulge component on the extrapolated value of the disk central surface brightness, along with arguments about visibility, are shown to produce a very narrow surface brightness distribution in close agreement with observational data.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Subjects:	Q Science > QB Astronomy
Uncontrolled Keywords:	disk galaxies ; elliptical galaxies ; galactic bulge ; galactic structure ; visible spectrum ; absorption spectra ; brightness distribution ; galactic clusters ; galactic evolution ; universe
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	0035-8711
Last Modified:	04 Jun 2017 04:27
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/39196

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