Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 434, Issue 3, Pages 2153-2166Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stt1168
Keywords
surveys; galaxies: fundamental parameters; galaxies: general; galaxies: structure
Categories
Funding
- Centro de Astronomia y Tecnologias Afines (CATA) [BASAL PFB-06]
- Proyecto Fondecyt Regular [1110328]
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- US Department of Energy Office of Science
- University of Arizona
- Brazilian Participation Group
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- University of Cambridge
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Florida
- French Participation Group
- German Participation Group
- Harvard University
- Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
- Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group
- Johns Hopkins University
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
- Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
- New Mexico State University
- New York University
- Ohio State University
- Pennsylvania State University
- University of Portsmouth
- Princeton University
- Spanish Participation Group
- University of Tokyo
- University of Utah
- Vanderbilt University
- University of Virginia
- University of Washington
- Yale University
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By modelling the axis ratio distribution of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 8 galaxies, we find the intrinsic 3D shapes of spirals and ellipticals. We use morphological information from the Galaxy Zoo project and assume a non-parametric distribution intrinsic of shapes, while taking into account dust extinction. We measure the dust extinction of the full sample of spiral galaxies and find a smaller value than previous estimations, with an edge-on extinction of E-0 = 0.284(-0.026)(+0.015) in the SDSS r band. We also find that the distribution of minor to major axis ratio has a mean value of 0.267 +/- 0.009, slightly larger than previous estimates mainly due to the lower extinction used; the same affects the circularity of galactic discs, which are found to be less round in shape than in previous studies, with a mean ellipticity of 0.215 +/- 0.013. For elliptical galaxies, we find that the minor to major axis ratio, with a mean value of 0.584 +/- 0.006, is larger than previous estimations due to the removal of spiral interlopers present in samples with morphological information from photometric profiles. These interlopers are removed when selecting ellipticals using Galaxy Zoo data. We find that the intrinsic shapes of galaxies and their dust extinction vary with absolute magnitude, colour and physical size. We find that bright elliptical galaxies are more spherical than faint ones, a trend that is also present with galaxy size, and that there is no dependence of elliptical galaxy shape with colour. For spiral galaxies, we find that the reddest ones have higher dust extinction as expected, due to the fact that this reddening is mainly due to dust. We also find that the thickness of discs increases with luminosity and size, and that brighter, smaller and redder galaxies have less round discs.
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