A catalog of stellar velocity dispersions. I - Compilation and standard galaxies

Abstract

A catalog of central stellar velocity dispersion measurements is presented, current through 1984 June. The catalog includes 1096 measurements of 725 galaxies. A set of 51 standard galaxies is defined which consists of galaxies with at least three reliable, concordant measurements. The authors suggest that future studies observe some of these standard galaxies in the course of their observations so that different studies can be normalized to the same system. Previous studies are compared with the derived standards to determine relative accuracies and to compute scale factors where necessary.