COLOR-MAGNITUDE DISTRIBUTION OF FACE-ON NEARBY GALAXIES IN SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DR7.

We have analyzed the distributions in the color-magnitude diagram (CMD) of a large sample of face-on galaxies to minimize the effect of dust extinctions on galaxy color. About 300,000 galaxies with log (a/b) < 0.2 and redshift z < 0.2 are selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 catalog. Two methods are employed to investigate the distributions of galaxies in the CMD, including one-dimensional (1D) Gaussian fitting to the distributions in individual magnitude bins and two-dimensional (2D) Gaussian mixture model (GMM) fitting to galaxies as a whole. We find that in the 1D fitting, two Gaussians are not enough to fit galaxies with the excess present between the blue cloud and the red sequence. The fitting to this excess defines the center of the green valley in the local universe to be (u – r)0.1 = –0.121Mr, 0.1 – 0.061. The fraction of blue cloud and red sequence galaxies turns over around Mr, 0.1 ∼ –20.1 mag, corresponding to stellar mass of 3 × 1010M☼. For the 2D GMM fitting, a total of four Gaussians are required, one for the blue cloud, one for the red sequence, and the additional two for the green valley. The fact that two Gaussians are needed to describe the distributions of galaxies in the green valley is consistent with some models that argue for two different evolutionary paths from the blue cloud to the red sequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]