Bibcode
Azzaro, Marco; Patiri, Santiago G.; Prada, Francisco; Zentner, Andrew R.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 376, Issue 1, pp. L43-L47.
Advertised on:
3
2007
Citations
76
Refereed citations
70
Description
We explore the angular distribution of two samples of satellite galaxies
orbiting isolated hosts extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data
Release 4. We find a clear alignment of the satellites along the major
axis of their hosts when restricting the analysis to red-coloured hosts.
The anisotropy is most pronounced for red satellites of red hosts. We
find that the distribution of the satellites about blue, isolated hosts
is consistent with isotropy. We show that under the assumption that the
true, underlying distribution of satellites of blue hosts exhibits the
same anisotropy as the satellites of red hosts, the sample of blue hosts
is too small to measure this anisotropy at a statistically significant
level. The anisotropy that we detect for satellites about red hosts is
independent of the projected radius. In particular, it is evident at
large projected distances from the hosts (300 < rp <
500 kpc).