The Broadband Optical Properties of Galaxies with Redshifts 0.02 &lt; <i>z</i> &lt; 0.22

Abstract

Using photometry and spectroscopy of 144,609 galaxies from the Sloan Digital\nSky Survey, we present bivariate distributions of pairs of seven galaxy\nproperties: four optical colors, surface brightness, radial profile shape as\nmeasured by the Sersic index, and absolute magnitude. In addition, we present\nthe dependence of local galaxy density (smoothed on 8 h^{-1} Mpc scales) on all\nof these properties. Several classic, well-known relations among galaxy\nproperties are evident at extremely high signal-to-noise ratio: the color-color\nrelations of galaxies, the color-magnitude relations, the magnitude-surface\nbrightness relation, and the dependence of density on color and absolute\nmagnitude. We show that most of the i-band luminosity density in the universe\nis in the absolute magnitude and surface brightness ranges used. Some of the\nrelationships between parameters, in particular the color--magnitude relations,\nshow stronger correlations for exponential galaxies and concentrated galaxies\ntaken separately than for all galaxies taken together. We provide a simple set\nof fits of the dependence of galaxy properties on luminosity for these two sets\nof galaxies.\n