Calibrating the fundamental plane with SDSS DR8 data^⋆

¹ European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Córdova 3107, Vitacura, Casilla 19001, Santiago, Chile
e-mail: csaulder@eso.org; smieske@eso.org
² Department of Astrophysics, University of Vienna, Türkenschanzstraße 17, 1180 Vienna, Austria
e-mail: werner.zeilinger@univie.ac.at
³ Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St. MS09 Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
e-mail: igor.chilingarian@cfa.harvard.edu
⁴ Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University, 13 Universitetski prospect, 119992 Moscow, Russia

Received: 13 March 2013
Accepted: 27 May 2013

Abstract

We present a calibration of the fundamental plane using SDSS Data Release 8. We analysed about 93 000 elliptical galaxies up to z < 0.2, the largest sample used for the calibration of the fundamental plane so far. We incorporated up-to-date K-corrections and used GalaxyZoo data to classify the galaxies in our sample. We derived independent fundamental plane fits in all five Sloan filters u, g, r, i, and z. A direct fit using a volume-weighted least-squares method was applied to obtain the coefficients of the fundamental plane, which implicitly corrects for the Malmquist bias. We achieved an accuracy of 15% for the fundamental plane as a distance indicator. We provide a detailed discussion on the calibrations and their influence on the resulting fits. These re-calibrated fundamental plane relations form a well-suited anchor for large-scale peculiar-velocity studies in the nearby universe. In addition to the fundamental plane, we discuss the redshift distribution of the elliptical galaxies and their global parameters.