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Counts and Colors of Faint Galaxies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2015

Richard G. Kron
Richard G. Kron*
Affiliation:
Yerkes Observatory, University of Chicago

Extract

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The color distribution of faint galaxies is an observational dimension which has not yet been fully exploited, despite the important constraints obtainable for galaxy evolution and cosmology. Number-magnitude counts alone contain very diluted information about the state of things because galaxies from a wide range in redshift contribute to the counts at each magnitude. The most-frequently-seen type of galaxy depends on the luminosity function and the relative proportions of galaxies of different spectral classes. The addition of color as a measured quantity can thus considerably sharpen the interpretation of galaxy counts since the apparent color depends on the redshift and rest-frame spectrum. To a first approximation two colors for a galaxy can determine a redshift and a spectral class, because redshift loci in a color-color diagram run roughly parallel to each other, and roughly perpendicular to the zero-redshift galaxy “main sequence” (Tinsley 1977a, Pence 1976) for small redshift. This game becomes more and more uncertain at higher redshift, because the systematics of galaxy UV spectral energy distributions are not well known, and what is known is not well understood (Code and Welch 1979). Redshifts for some random sample of faint galaxies is required to pin down the color-redshift relations; steps in this direction have already been taken by E. Turner. The reason for stressing colors, as opposed to redshifts, is that colors can be obtained relatively easily for large samples of faint galaxies if panoramic detectors are used: indeed, colors are not much more difficult to obtain than magnitudes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 92: Objects of High Redshift , 1980 , pp. 9 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Reidel 1980 

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