English

Morfometryka -- A New Way of Establishing Morphological Classification of Galaxies

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-09-21 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We present an extended morphometric system to automatically classify galaxies from astronomical images. The new system includes the original and modified versions of the CASGM coefficients (Concentration C1C_1, Asymmetry A3A_3, and Smoothness S3S_3), and the new parameters entropy, HH, and spirality σψ\sigma_\psi. The new parameters A3A_3, S3S_3 and HH are better to discriminate galaxy classes than A1A_1, S1S_1 and GG, respectively. The new parameter σψ\sigma_\psi captures the amount of non-radial pattern on the image and is almost linearly dependent on T-type. Using a sample of spiral and elliptical galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo project as a training set, we employed the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) technique to classify Baillard et al.(2011, 4478 galaxies), Nair \& Abraham (2010, 14123 galaxies) and SDSS Legacy (779,235 galaxies) samples. The cross-validation test shows that we can achieve an accuracy of more than 90\% with our classification scheme. Therefore, we are able to define a plane in the morphometric parameter space that separates the elliptical and spiral classes with a mismatch between classes smaller than 10\%. We use the distance to this plane as a morphometric index (Mi_{\rm i}) and we show that it follows the human based T-type index very closely. We calculate morphometric index Mi_{\rm i} for \sim780k galaxies from SDSS Legacy Survey - DR7. We discuss how Mi_{\rm i} correlates with stellar population parameters obtained using the spectra available from SDSS-DR7.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.05430,
  title  = {Morfometryka -- A New Way of Establishing Morphological Classification of Galaxies},
  author = {Fabricio Ferrari and Reinaldo Ramos de Carvalho and Marina Trevisan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.05430},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

16 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ