* Astronomy

Title: The GALEX Ultraviolet Atlas of Nearby Galaxies
Authors: A. Gil de Paz (1 and 2), S. Boissier (1 and 3), B.F. Madore (1 and 4), M. Seibert (5), Y.H. Joe (1 and 6), A. Boselli (3), T.K. Wyder (5), D. Thilker (7), L. Bianchi (7), S.-C. Rey (5), R.M. Rich (8), T.A. Barlow (5), T. Conrow (5), K. Forster (5), P.G. Friedman (5), D.C. Martin (5), P. Morrissey (5), S.G. Neff (9), D. Schiminovich (5 and 10), T. Small (5), J. Donas (3), T.M. Heckman (7), Y.-W. Lee (6), B. Milliard (3), A.S. Szalay (7), S. Yi (6) ((1) Carnegie Observatories, (2) Dept. Astrofisica, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, (3) Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France, (4) NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, Caltech, (5) Caltech, (6) Yonsei University, Korea, (7) Johns Hopkins University, (8) UCLA, (9) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, (10) Columbia University)

Researchers present images, integrated photometry, surface-brightness and colour profiles for a total of 1034 nearby galaxies recently observed by the GALEX satellite in its far-ultraviolet (FUV; 1516A) and near-ultraviolet (NUV; 2267A) bands. (...) This data set has been complemented with archival optical, near-infrared, and far-infrared fluxes and colours.
They find that the integrated (FUV-K) colour provides robust discrimination between elliptical and spiral/irregular galaxies and also among spiral galaxies of different sub-types. Elliptical galaxies with brighter K-band luminosities (i.e. more massive) are redder in (NUV-K) colour but bluer in (FUV-NUV) than less massive ellipticals. In the case of the spiral/irregular galaxies their analysis shows the presence of a relatively tight correlation between the (FUV-NUV) colour and the total infrared-to-UV ratio.
The correlation found between (FUV-NUV) colour and K-band luminosity (with lower luminosity objects being bluer than more luminous ones) can be explained as due to an increase in the dust content with galaxy luminosity.

Weblink for images in their Atlas.

[url=http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0606/0606440.pdf]Read more/url] ((975kb, PDF)