Galaxy triplets in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 - I. Catalogue

Abstract

We present a new catalogue of galaxy triplets derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7. The identification of systems was performed considering galaxies brighter than M_r=-20.5 and imposing constraints over the projected distances, radial velocity differences of neighbouring galaxies and isolation. To improve the identification of triplets we employed a data pixelization scheme, which allows to handle large amounts of data as in the SDSS photometric survey. Using spectroscopic and photometric data in the redshift range 0.01<z<0.40 we obtain 5901 triplet candidates. We have used a mock catalogue to analyse the completeness and contamination of our methods. The results show a high level of completeness (~80%) and low contamination (~5%). By using photometric and spectroscopic data we have also addressed the effects of fiber collisions in the spectroscopic sample. We have defined an isolation criterion considering the distance of the triplet brightest galaxy to closest neighbour cluster, to describe a global environment, as well as the galaxies within a fixed aperture, around the triplet brightest galaxy, to measure the local environment. The final catalogue comprises 1092 isolated triplets of galaxies in the redshift range 0.01<z<0.40. Our results show that photometric redshifts provide very useful information, allowing to complete the sample of nearby systems whose detection is affected by fiber collisions, as well as extending the detection of triplets to large distances, where spectroscopic redshifts are not available.