Galaxy populations in the Hydra I cluster from the VEGAS survey II. The ultra-diffuse galaxy population

TL;DR

This study extends the catalog of low-surface brightness and ultra-diffuse galaxies in the Hydra I cluster, revealing their properties, spatial distribution, and similarities to dwarf galaxies, suggesting UDGs are an extreme subset of dwarf galaxies.

Contribution

The paper provides a new catalog of UDGs and LSB galaxies in Hydra I, analyzing their properties and distribution, and compares them to dwarf galaxies to understand their nature.

Findings

UDGs and LSB galaxies have similar properties and distributions to dwarf galaxies.

UDGs are likely the extreme low-surface brightness tail of dwarf galaxies.

Photometric analysis suggests UDGs and LSBs share similar stellar populations and globular cluster content.

Abstract

In this work, we extend the catalog of low-surface brightness (LSB) galaxies, including Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy (UDG) candidates, within $\approx 0.4R_{vir}$ of the Hydra I cluster of galaxies, based on deep images from the VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey (VEGAS). The new galaxies are found by applying an automatic detection tool and carrying out additional visual inspections of $g$ and $r$ band images. This led to the detection of 11 UDGs and 8 more LSB galaxies. For all of them, the cluster membership has been assessed using the color-magnitude relation derived for early-type giant and dwarf galaxies in Hydra I. The UDGs and new LSB galaxies found in Hydra I span a wide range of central surface brightness ($22.7 \lesssim \mu_{0,g} \lesssim 26.5$ mag/arcsec$^2$), effective radius ($0.6 \lesssim R_e \lesssim 4.0$ kpc) and color ($0.4 \leq g-r \leq 0.9$ mag), and have stellar masses in the range $\sim 5\times 10^6 - 2\times 10^8$M$_{\odot}$. The 2D projected distribution of both galaxy types is similar to the spatial distribution of dwarf galaxies, with over-densities in the cluster core and north of the cluster centre. They have similar color distribution and comparable stellar masses to the red dwarf galaxies. Based on photometric selection, we identify a total of 9 globular cluster candidates associated to the UDGs and 4 to the LSB galaxies, with the highest number of candidates in an individual UDG being three. We find that there are no relevant differences between dwarfs, LSB galaxies and UDGs: the structural parameters (that is surface brightness, size, colors, n-index) and GCs content of the three classes have similar properties and trends. This finding is consistent with UDGs being the extreme LSB tail of the size-luminosity distribution of dwarfs in this environment.