The ACS Fornax Cluster Survey. IV. Deprojection of the Surface Brightness Profiles of Early-Type Galaxies in the Virgo and Fornax Clusters: Investigating the "Core/Power-Law Dichotomy"

TL;DR

This study uses deprojected luminosity density profiles of early-type galaxies in Virgo and Fornax to show a continuous variation in their core structures, challenging the previously suggested sharp dichotomy.

Contribution

It introduces a new parameter, Delta_3D, to quantify the central deviations of luminosity profiles, demonstrating a smooth variation rather than a dichotomy.

Findings

No evidence of a core/power-law dichotomy in deprojected profiles.

Luminosity profile deviations vary smoothly with galaxy magnitude.

The parameter Delta_3D captures systematic central profile variations.

Abstract

Although early observations with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) pointed to a sharp dichotomy among early-type galaxies in terms of the logarithmic slope gamma' of their central surface brightness profiles, several studies in the past few years have called this finding into question. In particular, recent imaging surveys of 143 early-type galaxies belonging to the Virgo and Fornax Clusters using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on board HST have not found a dichotomy in gamma', but instead a systematic progression from central luminosity deficit to excess relative to the inward extrapolation of the best-fitting global Sersic model. Given that earlier studies also found that the dichotomy persisted when analyzing the deprojected density profile slopes, we investigate the distribution of the three-dimensional luminosity density profiles of the ACS Virgo and Fornax Cluster Survey galaxies. Having fitted the surface brightness profiles with modified Sersic models, we then deproject the galaxies using an Abel integral and measure the inner slopes gamma_3D of the resulting luminosity density profiles at various fractions of the effective radius R_e. We find no evidence of a dichotomy, but rather, a continuous variation in the central luminosity profiles as a function of galaxy magnitude. We introduce a parameter, Delta_3D, that measures the central deviation of the deprojected luminosity profiles from the global Sersic fit, showing that this parameter varies smoothly and systematically along the luminosity function.