Bibcode
Agulli, I.; Aguerri, J. A. L.; Sánchez-Janssen, R.; Barrena, R.; Diaferio, A.; Serra, A. L.; Méndez-Abreu, J.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 444, Issue 1, p.L34-L38
Advertised on:
10
2014
Citations
36
Refereed citations
35
Description
We present a new deep determination of the spectroscopic luminosity
function (LF) within the virial radius of the nearby and massive Abell
85 (A85) cluster down to the dwarf regime (M* + 6) using Very Large
Telescope/Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VLT/VIMOS) spectra for
˜2000 galaxies with mr ≤ 21 mag and
<μe,r>≤ 24 mag arcsec-2. The
resulting LF from 438 cluster members is best modelled by a double
Schechter function due to the presence of a statistically significant
upturn at the faint end. The amplitude of this upturn (α
f = -1.58^{+0.19}_{-0.15}), however, is much smaller than
that of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) composite photometric
cluster LF by Popesso et al., αf ˜ -2. The
faint-end slope of the LF in A85 is consistent, within the
uncertainties, with that of the field. The red galaxy population
dominates the LF at low luminosities, and is the main factor responsible
for the upturn. The fact that the slopes of the spectroscopic LFs in the
field and in a cluster as massive as A85 are similar suggests that the
cluster environment does not play a major role in determining the
abundance of low-mass galaxies.
Related projects
Galaxy Evolution in Clusters of Galaxies
Galaxies in the universe can be located in different environments, some of them are isolated or in low density regions and they are usually called field galaxies. The others can be located in galaxy associations, going from loose groups to clusters or even superclusters of galaxies. One of the foremost challenges of the modern Astrophysics is to
Jairo
Méndez Abreu