Surface photometry of radio loud elliptical galaxies from the B2 sample

Abstract

V -band CCD imaging is presented for 72 galaxies from the B2 radio sample (Colla et al. 1975; Fanti et al. 1978), with redshifts up to 0.2 and radio powers W Hz-1 . According to the morphology on the optical images 57 galaxies are classified as ellipticals, 6 as spirals and 7 as irregular. Surface photometry of the sample of ellipticals was obtained fitting ellipses to the light distribution. The light profile of these galaxies generally follows a de Vaucouleurs law, although in three cases the profiles show large excesses relative to the law at large radii. The fitted and r e parameters for the de Vaucouleurs galaxies are given in the paper. Three of the ellipticals show a bright nucleus. One of them is a known broad line radio galaxy (B2 1833+32) and the remaining two are Markarian galaxies, classified in the literature as BL Lac objects (B2 1101+38 and B2 1652+39). The radial profiles for ellipticity, position angle, and B 4 term of the Fourier analysis are presented in the paper, and the morphological peculiarities of the ellipticals are described, including the presence of shells, tails, nuclear dust, isophote twisting, off-centering, and boxiness or diskness of the isophotes. Only one of the galaxies in this work is included in the subsample of B2 radio galaxies with well-defined jets (Parma et al. 1987). In this sense the present sample complements the sample of 24 radio galaxies with well-defined radio jets in Parma et al. for which a similar study was presented in Gonzalez-Serrano et al. (1993). The irregular galaxy B2 0916+33 appears to be misclassified, and we suggest that the right identification of the radio source is a nearby point like object with mag. The spiral galaxy associated with B2 1441+26 is also misclassified. A point-like optical object with mag, located at arcsec from the original identification and coincident with the radio core is the most probable counterpart.