Early-type galaxies in the Antlia Cluster: Catalogue and isophotal analysis

TL;DR

This study provides a comprehensive isophotal analysis of 138 early-type galaxies in the Antlia cluster, offering detailed surface photometry parameters and exploring their structural properties and correlations.

Contribution

It presents an expanded, detailed isophotal catalog of Antlia early-type galaxies with new surface photometry and analysis of isophotal shape parameters across different radial regions.

Findings

Some galaxies show radial gradients in ellipticity and Fourier coefficients.

Dwarf galaxies exhibit more significant Fourier coefficient gradients than non-dwarfs.

No strong correlation between Fourier coefficients and galaxy luminosity across the sample.

Abstract

We present a statistical isophotal analysis of 138 early-type galaxies in the Antlia cluster, located at a distance of ${\sim} 35$ Mpc. The observational material consists of CCD images of four $36$ arcmin ${\times} 36$ arcmin fields obtained with the MOSAIC II camera at the Blanco 4-m telescope at CTIO. Our present work supersedes previous Antlia studies in the sense that the covered area is four times larger, the limiting magnitude is $M_{B} {\sim} -9.6$ mag, and the surface photometry parameters of each galaxy are derived from S\'ersic model fits extrapolated to infinity. In a companion previous study we focused on the scaling relations obtained by means of surface photometry, and now we present the data, on which the previous paper is based, the parameters of the isophotal fits as well as an isophotal analysis. For each galaxy, we derive isophotal shape parameters along the semi-major axis and search for correlations within different radial bins. Through extensive statistical tests, we also analyse the behaviour of these values against photometric and global parameters of the galaxies themselves. While some galaxies do display radial gradients in their ellipticity (${\epsilon}$) and/or their Fourier coefficients, differences in mean values between adjacent regions are not statistically significant. Regarding Fourier coefficients, dwarf galaxies usually display gradients between all adjacent regions, while non-dwarfs tend to show this behaviour just between the two outermost regions. Globally, there is no obvious correlation between Fourier coefficients and luminosity for the whole magnitude range ($-12 {\gtrsim} M_{V} {\gtrsim} -22$); however, dwarfs display much higher dispersions at all radii.