Open AccessThe colour–magnitude relation for galaxies in the Coma cluster
Author(s) -
Terlevich A.I.,
Caldwell N.,
Bower R.G.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.058
H-Index - 383
eISSN - 1365-2966
pISSN - 0035-8711
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2001.04702.x
Subject(s) - physics , astrophysics , coma cluster , brightest cluster galaxy , astronomy , galaxy , magnitude (astronomy) , photometry (optics) , elliptical galaxy , galaxy cluster , stars
We present a new photometric catalogue of the Coma galaxy cluster in the Johnson U and V bands. We cover an area of 3360 arcmin 2 of sky, to a depth of in a 13‐arcsec diameter aperture, and produce magnitudes for ∼1400 extended objects in metric apertures from 8.8‐ to 26‐arcsec diameters. The mean internal rms scatter in the photometry is 0.014 mag in V , and 0.026 mag in U , for . We place new limits on the levels of scatter in the colour–magnitude relation (CMR) in the Coma cluster, and investigate how the slope and scatter of the CMR depend on galaxy morphology, luminosity and position within the cluster. As expected, the lowest levels of scatter are found in the elliptical galaxies, while the late‐type galaxies have the highest numbers of galaxies bluewards of the CMR. We investigate whether the slope of the CMR is an artefact of colour gradients within galaxies, and show that it persists when the colours are measured within a diameter that scales with galaxy size. Looking at the environmental dependence of the CMR, we find a trend of systematically bluer galaxy colours with increasing projected radius from the centre of the cluster. Surprisingly, this is accompanied by a decreased scatter of the CMR. We investigate whether this gradient could be caused by dust in the cluster potential, however the reddening required would produce too large a scatter in the colours of the central galaxies. The gradient appears to be better reproduced by a gradient in the mean galactic ages with projected radius.