Ultra-Flat Galaxies Selected from RFGC Catalog. I. The Sample Properties

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive sample of ultra-flat galaxies from the RFGC catalog, analyzing their properties, morphology, brightness, and environment, revealing their predominantly late-type, thin, and isolated nature.

Contribution

It introduces a large, well-defined sample of ultra-flat galaxies and provides detailed analysis of their morphological, photometric, and environmental characteristics.

Findings

Over 75% of UFGs are of late morphological types (Scd, Sd, Sdm).

Most UFGs are dynamically isolated or in small groups.

The average surface brightness decreases with increasing flatness.

Abstract

We used the Revised Flat Galaxy Catalog (RFGC) to create a sample of ultra-flat galaxies (UFG) covering the whole northern and southern sky apart from the Milky Way zone. It contains 817 spiral galaxies seen edge-on, selected into the UFG sample according to their apparent axial ratios $(a/b)_B\geq10.0$ and $(a/b)_R\geq8.53$ in the blue and red bands, respectively. Within this basic sample we fixed an exemplary sample of 441 UFG galaxies having the radial velocities of $V_{LG} < 10000$ km s$^{-1}$, Galactic latitude of $\mid b\mid>10^{\circ}$ and the blue angular diameter of $a_B > 1.0^{\prime}$. According to the Schmidt test the exemplary sample of 441 galaxies is characterized by about (80-90)% completeness, what is quite enough to study different properties of the ultra-flat galaxies. We found that more than 3/4 of UFGs have the morphological types within the narrow range of $T= 7\pm1$, i.e. the thinnest stellar disks occur among the Scd, Sd, and Sdm types. The average surface brightness of UFG galaxies tends to diminish towards the flattest bulge-less galaxies. Regularly shaped disks without signs of asymmetry make up about 2/3 both among all the RFGC galaxies, and the UFG sample objects. About 60% of ultra-flat galaxies can be referred to dynamically isolated objects, while 30% of them probably belong to the scattered associations (filaments, walls), and only about 10% of them are dynamically dominating galaxies with respect to their neighbours.