A Catalog of Bulge+Disk Decompositions and Updated Photometry for 1.12 Million Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of bulge+disk decompositions and updated photometry for over 1.12 million SDSS galaxies, improving structural parameter robustness and providing valuable data for galaxy studies.

Contribution

It introduces improved decomposition procedures and a large, publicly available catalog with detailed structural parameters for a vast galaxy sample.

Findings

Robust structural parameters with errors below 0.1 mag for bright galaxies.

Comparison of three galaxy fitting models to determine the best fit.

Public release of extensive galaxy structural parameter catalogs.

Abstract

We perform two-dimensional, Point-Spread-Function-convolved, bulge+disk decompositions in the $g$ and $r$ bandpasses on a sample of 1,123,718 galaxies from the Legacy area of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Seven. Four different decomposition procedures are investigated which make improvements to sky background determinations and object deblending over the standard SDSS procedures that lead to more robust structural parameters and integrated galaxy magnitudes and colors, especially in crowded environments. We use a set of science-based quality assurance metrics namely the disk luminosity-size relation, the galaxy color-magnitude diagram and the galaxy central (fiber) colors to show the robustness of our structural parameters. The best procedure utilizes simultaneous, two-bandpass decompositions. Bulge and disk photometric errors remain below 0.1 mag down to bulge and disk magnitudes of $g \simeq 19$ and $r \simeq 18.5$. We also use and compare three different galaxy fitting models: a pure Sersic model, a $n_b=4$ bulge + disk model and a Sersic (free $n_b$) bulge + disk model. The most appropriate model for a given galaxy is determined by the $F$-test probability. All three catalogs of measured structural parameters, rest-frame magnitudes and colors are publicly released here. These catalogs should provide an extensive comparison set for a wide range of observational and theoretical studies of galaxies.