AGES AND METALLICITIES OF CLUSTER GALAXIES IN A779 USING MODIFIED STROeMGREN PHOTOMETRY

In the quest for the formation and evolution of galaxy clusters, Rakos and co-workers introduced a spectrophotometric method using modified Stroemgren photometry, but with the considerable debate toward the project's abilities, we re-introduce the system by testing for the repeatability of the modified Stroemgren colors and compare them with the Stroemgren colors, and check for the reproducibility of the ages and metallicities (using the Principle Component Analysis (PCA) technique and the GALEV models) for the six common galaxies in all three A779 data sets. As a result, a fair agreement between two filter systems was found to produce similar colors (with a precision of 0.09 mag in (uz - vz), 0.02 mag in (bz - yz), and 0.03 mag in (vz - vz)) and the generated ages and metallicities are also similar (with an uncertainty of 0.36 Gyr and 0.04 dex from PCA and 0.44 Gyr and 0.2 dex using the GALEV models). We infer that the technique is able to relieve the age-metallicity degeneracy by separating the age effects from the metallicity effects, but it is still unable to completely eliminate it. We further extend this paper to re-study the evolution of galaxies in the low mass, dynamically poor A779 cluster (as it was not elaborately analyzed by Rakos and co-workers in their previous work) by correlating the luminosity (mass), density, and radial distance with the estimated age, metallicity, and the star formation history. Our results distinctly show the bimodality of the young, low-mass, metal-poor population with a mean age of 6.7 Gyr ({+-} 0.5 Gyr) and the old, high-mass, metal-rich galaxies with a mean age of 9 Gyr ({+-} 0.5 Gyr). The method also observes the color evolution of the blue cluster galaxies to red (Butcher-Oemler phenomenon), and the downsizing phenomenon. Our analysis shows that modified Stroemgren photometry is very well suited for studying low- and intermediate-z clusters, as it is capable of observing deeper with better spatial resolution at spectroscopic redshift limits, and the narrowband filters estimate the age and metallicity with fewer uncertainties compared to other methods that study stellar population scenarios.