Analysis of X-ray luminosities of isolated elliptical galaxies in SDSS

Park, Gott, & Choi (2008) found that when a galaxy is located within the virial radius from its closest neighbor and the neighbor is an elliptical, the probability of the galaxy to be an elliptical is very sensitive to the large-scale background density over a few Mpc scales. They suggested that the large-scale dependence can be arise if the temperature of a diffuse hot gas held by elliptical galaxies are higher in higher density environment. In this study, to understand the large-scale environment affects the X-ray properties of individual galaxies, we investigated the dependence of the X-ray luminosities of the elliptical galaxies on the large-scale environment using X-ray and optical data which we selected from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7. To exclude galaxies embedded in an intra-group/cluster medium which could enhance their observed X-ray luminosity, we used isolated elliptical galaxies.