Testing the predictions of the cold dark matter model for the sizes, colours, morphologies and luminosities of galaxies with the SDSS

Understand

The huge size and uniformity of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey makes possible an exacting test of current models of galaxy formation.

• We compare the predictions of the GALFORM semi-analytical galaxy formation model for the luminosities, morphologies, colours and scale-lengths of local galaxies.
• GALFORM models the luminosity and size of the disk and bulge components of a galaxy, and so we can compute quantities which can be compared directly with SDSS observations, such as the Petrosian magnitude and the Sersic index.
• We test the predictions of two published models set in the cold dark matter cosmology: the Baugh et al.