A&A 557, A21 (2013) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201321466 & c ESO 2013 Astrophysics Calibrating the fundamental plane with SDSS DR8 data Christoph Saulder1,2,Steffen Mieske1, Werner W. Zeilinger2, and Igor Chilingarian3,4 1 European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Córdova 3107, Vitacura, Casilla 19001, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [csaulder,smieske]@eso.org 2 Department of Astrophysics, University of Vienna, Türkenschanzstraße 17, 1180 Vienna, Austria e-mail:
[email protected] 3 Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St. MS09 Cambridge, MA 02138, USA e-mail:
[email protected] 4 Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University, 13 Universitetski prospect, 119992 Moscow, Russia Received 13 March 2013 / Accepted 27 May 2013 ABSTRACT We present a calibration of the fundamental plane using SDSS Data Release 8. We analysed about 93 000 elliptical galaxies up to z < 0.2, the largest sample used for the calibration of the fundamental plane so far. We incorporated up-to-date K-corrections and used GalaxyZoo data to classify the galaxies in our sample. We derived independent fundamental plane fits in all five Sloan filters u, g, r, i,andz. A direct fit using a volume-weighted least-squares method was applied to obtain the coefficients of the fundamental plane, which implicitly corrects for the Malmquist bias. We achieved an accuracy of 15% for the fundamental plane as a distance indicator. We provide a detailed discussion on the calibrations and their influence on the resulting fits. These re-calibrated fundamental plane relations form a well-suited anchor for large-scale peculiar-velocity studies in the nearby universe.