# The bimodal spiral galaxy surface brightness distribution

## 1 Introduction

The distribution of spiral galaxy disc surface brightnesses is of great observational and theoretical importance in extragalactic astronomy. Observationally, knowledge about the present day disc galaxy central surface brightness distribution (SBD) allows us to better understand the importance and implications of surface brightness selection effects, which is important for e.g. understanding the local galaxy luminosity function (e.g. Dalcanton 1998; de Jong & Lacey 1998), or in comparing galaxy populations at low and high redshifts (e.g. Simard et al. 1999). Theories of galaxy formation and evolution link the SBD with the angular momentum, mass and star formation history of galaxies: indeed, the SBD has been used as a constraint on some galaxy evolution models \[Dalcanton, Spergel & Summers 1997, Mo, Mao & White 1998, Baugh et al. 1998\].

Previous studies have generally found a SBD that can be described as flat or slowly declining with surface brightness, modulated by a sharp cut-off at the high surface brightness end, normally associated with the Freeman \[Freeman 1970\] value (e.g. de Jong 1996c; McGaugh 1996).

Tully and Verheijen (1997; TV hereafter) derived the SBD of a complete sample of 60 spiral discs in the Ursa Major Cluster from an imaging study in the optical and near-infrared \[Tully et al. 1996\]. Their data suggested an inclination-corrected near-infrared bimodal SBD (as opposed to the conventional unimodal distribution described above) with a peak associated with the Freeman value, and a second peak $`3`$ mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup> fainter, separated by a gap (Fig. 1, solid line in panel a). This would have far-reaching implications for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. A bimodal SBD would imply that there are two discrete galaxy populations: a high surface density population and one with surface densities a factor of $`10`$ lower (assuming comparable mass to light ratios for the two populations). Correspondingly, the masses, spin distributions and star formation histories of these two families of galaxies would adopt one of two preferred states, and plausible mechanisms for generating these discrete differences in e.g. star formation history, or spin distribution, would have to be found.

Why this bimodal distribution was not found before is an important question. TV address this problem at length: here we will summarise their main arguments. First, the bimodal SBD is based on near-infrared $`K^{}`$ data and, in fact, is only really apparent there. Near-infrared photometry is much less susceptible to the effects of dust extinction than optical photometry. Furthermore, high surface brightness galaxies are typically redder than low surface brightness galaxies (de Jong 1996b), which accentuates the gap in the near-infrared. TV demonstrate that in the optical $`B`$ band the bimodality is washed out by these effects: the bimodality in the optical is consistent with the bimodality in the near-infrared, but is less significant (accordingly, we do not consider TV’s optical SBDs here). A bimodal SBD would therefore remain undetected in optical studies (e.g. McGaugh 1996, de Jong & Lacey 1998).

Second, the TV SBD has been determined from a complete sample of galaxies at a common distance, making selection effects much easier to understand. This may explain why de Jong \[de Jong 1996c\], using $`K`$ band photometry for a sample of field spiral galaxies, did not report any sign of bimodality in his SBD.

In an attempt to investigate whether the bimodal distribution could be caused by environmental differences, TV defined an isolated subsample, consisting of 36 galaxies that have a projected distance $`>80`$ kpc to their nearest neighbour (assuming a distance to the Ursa Major Cluster of 15.5 Mpc, corresponding to $`H_0=85`$ kms<sup>-1</sup> Mpc<sup>-1</sup>). They found that the gap is more pronounced in this isolated subsample, and attributed intermediate surface brightnesses found in their total sample to interactions (Fig. 1, solid line in panel b).

Unfortunately, TV did not attempt to robustly estimate the significance of the apparent bimodality. Their only estimate is based on the isolated subsample where they compare the number of galaxies in the 1.5 mag wide gap (between $``$ 17.5 and $``$ 19 mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup>; 3 galaxies) with the number of galaxies that they expected to see in that gap (20 galaxies). This expectation value was derived from a model unimodal distribution normalised to reproduce the peak number of galaxies in the high surface brightness bins, not the total number of galaxies. Properly normalising the model distribution lowers the expectation from $``$ 20 galaxies to $`12`$ galaxies.

In this paper, we investigate the significance of the bimodal near-infrared SBD, focussing on whether this bimodality is simply an artifact of small number statistics. In sections 2 and 3, we use a Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) style of test to address this question, investigating the significance of both the total and isolated samples. In section 4, we discuss the results, focussing on the rôle of inclination corrections. We present our main conclusions in section 5.

## 2 Constructing a null hypothesis

In order to test the significance of the bimodality in the SBD, it is necessary to choose a null distribution to test the observations against. Ordinarily, it would be best to choose some kind of ‘best bet’ observationally determined or theoretically motivated null hypothesis: failure of this null hypothesis would indicate that it does not accurately describe the dataset. However, in this case, we wish to quantify the significance of a particular feature in the observational distribution, namely the bimodality in the Ursa Major Cluster SBD. For this reason, it is necessary to be careful about choosing a null distribution: if a null distribution was chosen which did not adequately describe the general features of the SBD, then a high significance (i.e. a low probability of obtaining the data from the null) would not represent a large degree of bimodality, but rather would indicate that the null hypothesis was a poor match to the general shape of the SBD.

For this reason, we have chosen to fit a relatively simple model distribution to the data (taking into account selection effects), allowing us to determine the significance of the bimodality by minimising the mismatches between the general shapes of the two distributions.

For the unimodal model, we use a slightly modified version of the optical SBD presented in McGaugh \[McGaugh 1996\]:

$`\mathrm{log}_{10}\mathrm{\Phi }(\mu _{K^{},0})`$ $`=m(\mu _{K^{},0}\mu _{K^{},0}^{})`$   
$`\mathrm{where}`$ $`\{\begin{array}{cccc}m\hfill & =\hfill & m_f\hfill & \mathrm{if}\mu _{K^{},0}\mu _{K^{},0}^{}\hfill \\ m\hfill & =\hfill & 2.6\hfill & \mathrm{if}\mu _{K^{},0}<\mu _{K^{},0}^{}\hfill \end{array}`$ (3)   
The critical surface brightness $`\mu _{K^{},0}^{}`$ and the faint-end slope $`m_f`$ are adjustable parameters which are fit below. <sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1McGaugh’s original values were $`\mu _0^{}=`$ 21.5 $`B_J`$ mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup> and $`m_f=0.3`$, which are roughly consistent with the best fit results described in section 3. For reasonable values of $`m_f`$, the number of galaxies per unit mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup> only slowly changes with surface brightness, and falls quite sharply to zero above a given ‘critical’ surface brightness $`\mu _{K^{},0}^{}`$ (see e.g. the dashed line in panel e of Fig. 1).

To take into account the selection effects that affect TV’s observations, it is also necessary to adopt a scale size distribution: we assume that the scale size distribution is constant (per logarithmic interval) over the interval $`\mathrm{log}_{10}h_K^{}=0.8`$ to $`\mathrm{log}_{10}h_K^{}=1.7`$ ($``$6.3 arcsec to 50.1 arcsec, or, at an adopted distance of 15.5 Mpc, $``$0.5 to 3.8 kpc).

Selection criteria are modelled by choosing only galaxies with isophotal magnitudes $`m_K^{}<12`$, and isophotal diameters $`D_K^{}>60^{\prime \prime }`$, both measured at the 22.5 $`K^{}`$ mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup> isophote. Though these criteria differ slightly from those used by TV (as their selection was made in $`B`$ band rather than $`K^{}`$ band), they are comparable to better than 0.5 mag, assuming $`BK^{}3`$ for faint late-type galaxies \[de Jong 1996b\], and accurately follow the surface brightness and size limits on TV’s $`\mu _{K^{},0}\mathrm{log}_{10}h_K^{}`$ plane. We emphasize that we do not hope to somehow represent the ‘universal’ $`K^{}`$ band SBD with this function, we simply aim to construct a plausible, simple SBD that provides a sensible single-peaked fit to the observed bimodal Ursa Major SBD.

In panel e in Fig. 1, we show a 10<sup>4</sup> galaxy Monte Carlo realisation of a model distribution with $`\mu _{K^{},0}^{}=16.3`$ and $`m_f=0.0`$ (also in panels a and b, and in cumulative form in panels g and h as a dashed line). We also show the same model distribution without the selection effects (with arbitrary normalisation) in panel e as a dashed line.

## 3 Results

In the above section, we described the single-peaked distribution that we will fit to the observed SBD. As we want to take into account selection effects in the null distribution, we cannot make a straightforward fit, but have to use Monte Carlo realisations of the null distribution and associated selection effects. We generate a grid of Monte Carlo unimodal distributions, each containing 10<sup>4</sup> galaxies (later renormalised to contain the same number of galaxies in the observed SBD), and each with different values of $`\mu _{K^{},0}^{}`$ and $`m_f`$ (with grid steps of 0.05 in $`\mu _{K^{},0}^{}`$ and 0.02 in $`m_f`$). The best fit unimodal distribution is determined by minimising the Cash statistic $`C=2_{i=1}^{n_{bins}}\mathrm{log}P_i(n,\lambda )`$, where $`P_i(n,\lambda )`$ is the Poissonian probability of observing $`n`$ galaxies in a bin which the unimodal model predicts should have a mean galaxy number of $`\lambda `$ \[Cash 1979\]. The Cash statistic has the advantage that the underlying distribution does not have to be Gaussian. As the model grid used to determine the best fit is itself a Monte Carlo realisation of the true underlying model grid, the best fit parameters will depend slightly on the model grid realisation used. This ultimately affects the significances that we will derive later. We have therefore run the code 10 times, and thus constructed 10 realisations of the entire model grid, and derived a best fit for each of these realisations. The best fit unimodal distribution typically has parameters around $`\mu _{K^{},0}^{}16.35\pm 0.05`$ mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup> and a faint end slope $`m_f0.05\pm 0.08`$, where these uncertainties are the RMS variation in the fit parameters.

To estimate the significance of the departures of the observed SBD from the best fit model distribution we use the KS statistic $`d_{\mathrm{max}}`$, defined as the maximum distance between the cumulative distributions of the model and the data (i.e. the maximum distance between the solid and dashed lines in panels g and h of Fig. 1). The $`d_{\mathrm{max},\mathrm{obs}}`$ between this best fit model and observed SBD is then measured.

However, because we have fitted a single peaked distribution to the bimodal SBD, it is not possible to convert the measured $`d_{\mathrm{max},\mathrm{obs}}`$ into a probability in the standard way (e.g. Press et al. 1986). <sup>2</sup><sup>2</sup>2Note that the binning of the data in a histogram also, strictly speaking, invalidates the use of a standard KS test, although if the binning is over a much smaller scale than the ‘structure’ in the SBD (as it is in this case), tests have shown that the effects on the final significances are negligible. Therefore, it is necessary to use Monte Carlo simulations to convert the measured maximum distance into a probability. Accordingly, we generated 100 random simulated datasets from the best fit model, and subjected them to the same fitting and maximum distance measuring procedure as the data. In this way, we determined what the distribution of maximum distances should be from the simulations. The fraction of simulations with maximum distances larger than the $`d_{\mathrm{max},\mathrm{obs}}`$ then gives us the probability $`P`$ that the observed dataset was a statistical accident.

Because the model unimodal distributions are Monte Carlo realisations of the true model distributions, this procedure (i.e. generating the 100 datasets and measuring the significance) was repeated for each of the 10 model grid realisations described above, to allow more accurate measurement of the significance. The significance is defined as $`1P`$, with $`P`$ defined as above. Significances for the total sample of 60 galaxies, and the isolated sample of 36 galaxies are given in Table 1. Quoted significances are the mean (along with the error in those means) of the 10 runs. Note that we also carried out this analysis in two different programming languages on two different computers using different sets of random number generators: the results were found to be indistinguishable to within the quoted errors.

## 4 Discussion

From Table 1, it is clear that the bimodality shown by the total sample is not statistically significant. However, the isolated subsample shows a bimodality significant at the 96 per cent level. To understand if this high significance of the histogram for the isolated subsample reflects a true, astrophysical bimodality in the Ursa Major Cluster, it is necessary to understand the assumptions used to construct the isolated galaxy SBD.

An obvious check is to see whether systematic effects in the data can produce a bimodality, e.g., because of bulge contamination in the fits. We re-fit the surface brightness profiles presented in Tully et al. \[Tully et al. 1996\] using the ‘marking the disc’ technique (the same technique that was used by TV), to check that there were no obvious personal biases in the fitting of the surface brightness profiles. Comparing our $`K^{}`$ band central surface brightnesses with those of Tully et al. \[Tully et al. 1996\], we found a mean offset of +0.16 mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup>, and that 68 per cent of the central surface brightnesses compared to better than $`\pm `$ 0.25 mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup> (both with and without this mean offset applied). When corrected for inclination in exactly the same way as TV (assuming an infinitely thin disc; by subtracting $`2.5\mathrm{log}_{10}(b/a)`$, where $`b/a`$ is the minor to major axis ratio), the two versions of the isolated subsample SBD are virtually indistinguishable (see Fig. 1, panel c), and the significance of the re-fitted distribution is hardly different, decreasing slightly to 86 per cent. This suggests that there are no systematic personal biases in the fits TV use that might introduce a spurious bimodality. Note that de Jong \[de Jong 1996a\] shows that the ‘marking the disc’ technique is unbiased, with $``$ 90 per cent of the central surface brightnesses accurate to 0.5 mag, compared to more sophisticated bulge-disc decomposition techniques.

However, because there was no inclination cut applied to the Ursa Major sample, some of the inclination corrections that were applied to the $`K^{}`$ band surface brightnesses were rather large: in $``$ 1/3 of the cases (in either the total or isolated samples) they exceeded 1 mag. However, large inclination corrections are highly uncertain for a number of reasons, even in $`K^{}`$ band.

In Fig. 2, we show only two of the many uncertainties that affect inclination corrections in $`K^{}`$ band. First we computed the corrected surface brightnesses, assuming i) an infinitely thin disc (solid circles) and ii) an intrinsic disc axial ratio $`q_0=0.2`$ (Holmberg 1958; open circles). These two values are connected with a dashed line in Fig. 2. The error bars in Fig. 2 represent the random uncertainty in the inclination correction due to axial ratio errors of 0.05. Taken together, this shows that the inclination corrections for galaxies with axial ratios $`b/a`$ below 0.4 have considerable systematic uncertainties stemming from our poor knowledge of the intrinsic axial ratios of galaxies, coupled with the random uncertainty associated with measurement error. Taken together, consideration of these two uncertainties argues that the inclination corrections applied in this paper and by TV are likely to be lower limits.

However, a number of effects conspire to make inclination corrections smaller, suggesting that the inclination corrections might actually be upper limits. Firstly, the effects of dust in nearly edge-on galaxies is non-negligible, even in the $`K^{}`$ band, which could lower the inclination correction by roughly as much as 0.3 mag \[Tully et al. 1998\]. Secondly, averaging of the surface brightness profiles over elliptical annuli at high inclinations (as in this case) is likely to produce systematic underestimates of the real central surface brightness \[Huizinga 1994\]. Finally, at large inclinations, the assumption of a thin, uniform slab disc breaks down: vertical and radial structure in the galaxy will affect the inclination correction in non-trivial ways. Accordingly, in Fig. 2 we have also connected the inclination corrected surface brightness with the uncorrected surface brightness with a dotted line.

In Fig. 2, we can see that uncertainties in these large inclination corrections may go some way towards filling in the gap in the SBD. As an example, we consider the four galaxies with the largest inclination corrections. UGC 6667, UGC 6894, NGC 4010 and NGC 4183 have $`>2`$ mag inclination corrections and uncorrected (reasonably high) $`K^{}`$ surface brightnesses between 17 and 18.5 mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup>. The large corrections move them across the gap from the high surface brightness into the low surface brightness regime. However, if these corrections are at all uncertain, they may in reality lie in the gap of the $`K^{}`$ band SBD. Moving even one or two of them into the gap in the isolated galaxy SBD would decrease markedly the significance of the bimodality in the isolated subsample. Certainly a few of the galaxies mentioned above suffer from problems that may seriously affect the value of the inclination correction (not because of the uncertainty in axial ratio, but because of uncertainties in e.g. the vertical and radial structure in the galaxy): NGC 4010 is clearly lopsided, with one half of the galaxy puffed up with respect to the other half, while NGC 4183 has a clear warp.

Because of these serious uncertainties in the larger inclination corrections, and because there are no clear recipes for producing more realistic inclination corrections which take into account dust and the vertical and radial structure of the disc, the only fair thing to do is omit the high-inclination galaxies from the SBD. Accordingly, the high-inclination galaxies were removed from the isolated subsample, leaving 23 galaxies with $`b/a`$ larger than 0.4, corresponding to an inclination of less than 66 or inclination corrections smaller than 1 mag. The resulting SBD is shown in Fig. 1, panel d: the bimodality is insignificant in this SBD, due primarily to small number statistics (Table 1). To check how large the sample size needs to be to detect significant bimodality in the low inclination isolated subsample, we simulated intrinsically bimodal datasets and tested them using the above procedure. Bimodal datasets were generated using two normal distributions with $`\sigma =0.5`$ mag and means of 17.15 and 19.85 mag arcsec<sup>-2</sup>, with the high surface brightness peak containing on average 63 per cent of the galaxies (thus resembling the TV distribution). These simulations showed that in order to detect a bimodality at the 95 (99) per cent level in the low inclination sample at least 4/5 of the time, the sample size needs to be increased to around 50 (100) galaxies.

## 5 Conclusions

We have re-analysed Tully & Verheijen’s (1997) bimodal SBD, using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov style of test to estimate the likelihood that a single-peaked distribution would be able to reproduce the bimodality in the Ursa Major Cluster.

* The total sample of 60 galaxies is inconsistent with a single-peaked distribution at only the 58 per cent level.
* However, the isolated subsample of 36 galaxies is significantly bimodal: it is inconsistent with the null distribution at the 96 per cent level.
* We re-fit the $`K^{}`$ band surface brightness profiles of the Ursa Major sample, and found that this re-fit made relatively little difference, with the isolated subsample retaining a reasonable significance of 86 per cent.
* However, we argue that large inclination corrections are uncertain even in the near-infrared, placing the reality of the gap between high and low surface brightness galaxies in some doubt.
* When the galaxies with inclination corrections $`>1`$ mag are removed from the isolated subsample, the significance of the 23 galaxy subsample drops to only 40 per cent.
* Assuming that the low inclination, isolated galaxy SBD is truly bimodal, in order to increase the significance to 95 (99) per cent, it is necessary to increase the low inclination isolated galaxy sample size by around a factor of two (four).

To summarise, if inclination corrections greater than 1 mag can be trusted, then there is reasonable evidence that the Ursa Major Cluster SBD is bimodal. If, however, these large inclination corrections are in some doubt, then the SBD lacks a sufficient number of galaxies to argue convincingly against a unimodal SBD. Either way, to convincingly demonstrate at the 99 per cent level that the near-infrared spiral galaxy SBD is bimodal will require an independent dataset to be used with around a factor of four more low inclination, isolated galaxies than are included in the Ursa Major Cluster sample.

## Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Marc Verheijen for providing tables of data in electronic form. We would also like to thank the referee for their comments on the manuscript. We would like to thank Greg Bothun, Roelof Bottema, Richard Bower, Roelof de Jong, Rob Kennicutt, John Lucey and Stacy McGaugh for useful discussions and comments on the manuscript. EFB would like to thank the Isle of Man Education Department for their generous support. This project made use of STARLINK facilities in Durham.