Properties of satellite galaxies in the SDSS photometric survey: luminosities, colours and projected number density profile.

MARIANO JAVIER DE LEON DOMINGUEZ ROMERO, ANDRES NICOLAS RUIZ; LARES MARCELO; DIEGO GARCIA LAMBAS

Santa Bárbara, California

Congreso; First Light and Faintest Dwarfs: Extreme Probes of the Cold Dark Matter Paradigm; 2012

UC Santa Barbara, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics

We analyze photometric data in SDSS-DR7 to infer statistical properties of faint satellites associated to isolated bright galaxies ( M_r < -20.5 ) in the redshift range 0.03 < z < 0.1. The mean projected radial profile shows an excess of companions in the photometric sample around the primaries, with approximately a power law shape that extends up to ~ 700 kpc. Given this overdensity signal, a suitable background subtraction method is used to study the statistical properties of the population of bound satellites, down to magnitude M_r = -14.5, in the projected radial distance range 100 < r_p [kpc] < 3 R_vir.