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Physical properties for galaxies and active galactic nuclei

in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey:

Data catalogues from SDSS studies at MPA/JHU

By providing homogeneous photometric and spectroscopic data of high quality for very large and objectively selected samples of galaxies, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey allows statistical studies of the physical properties of galaxies and AGN to be carried out at an entirely unprecedented level of precision and detail.

Here we publicly release catalogues of derived physical properties for 567486 spectra of approximately 520500 individual galaxies (after accounting for repeat observations), including 88178 narrow-line AGN. The majority of these are from complete samples with well understood selection criteria drawn from the normal galaxy spectroscopic sample in the fourth SDSS public data release (DR4). We do however caution that the DR4 also include further special plates which have different properties and any researcher wishing to do statistical studies must be aware of this. Files are included that provide the necessary information. We list properties obtained from the SDSS spectroscopy and photometry using modelling techniques presented in papers already published by our group.

These properties include: stellar masses; stellar mass-to-light ratios; effective stellar attenuation by dust; indicators of recent major starbursts; current total and specific star-formation rates, both for the regions with spectroscopy and for the galaxies as a whole; gas-phase metallicities; AGN classifications based on the standard emission line ratio diagnostic diagrams; AGN luminosities in the [O III]5007 emission line (a proxy for the accretion rate).

We also have kept our previous DR2 dataset which provides some quantities which have not yet been calculated for the DR4, such as environment density estimates, stellar metallicities and stellar ages, as well as matches to radio, and UV-bright samples.

We also list our own measurements of absorption line indices and emission line fluxes and a number of other parameters calculated by the SDSS, in addtion providing matches to the HST observation archive.

The data presented here were produced by a collaboration of researchers (currently or formerly) from the MPA and the JHU. The team is made up of Stephane Charlot, Guinevere Kauffmann and Simon White (MPA), Tim Heckman (JHU), Christy Tremonti (University of Arizona - formerly JHU) and Jarle Brinchmann ( Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto - formerly MPA).

Publications

Clicking on the titles below will take you to the appropriate ADS page for each paper.

Published

Submitted/in press