An extensive catalogue of early-type galaxies in the nearby Universe

Abstract

We present a catalogue of 1715 early-type galaxies from the literature, spanning the luminosity range from faint dwarf spheroidal galaxies to giant elliptical galaxies. The aim of this catalogue is to be one of the most comprehensive and publicly available collections of data on early-type galaxies. The emphasis in this catalogue lies on dwarf elliptical galaxies, for which some samples with detailed data have been published recently. For almost all of the early-type galaxies included in it, this catalogue contains data on their locations, distances, redshifts, half-light radii, the masses of their stellar populations and apparent magnitudes in various passbands. Data on metallicity and various colours are available for a majority of the galaxies presented here. The data on magnitudes, colours, metallicities and masses of the stellar populations are supplemented with entries that are based on fits to data from simple stellar population models and existing data from observations. Also, some simple transformations have been applied to the data on magnitudes, colours and metallicities in this catalogue, in order to increase the homogeneity of these data. Estimates on the Sérsic profiles, internal velocity dispersions, maximum rotational velocities, dynamical masses and ages are listed for several hundreds of the galaxies in this catalogue. Finally, each quantity listed in this catalogue is accompanied with information on its source, so that users of this catalogue can easily exclude data that they do not consider as reliable enough for their purposes.