Dark matter inside early-type galaxies as function of mass and redshift

We study the behaviour of the dynamical and stellar mass inside the effective radius (r e) of early-type galaxies (ETGs). We use several samples of ETGs – ranging from 19 000 to 98 000 objects – from the ninth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We consider Newtonian dynamics, different light profiles and different initial mass functions (IMF) to calculate the dynamical and stellar mass. We assume that any difference between these two masses is due to dark matter and/or a non-universal IMF. The main results for galaxies in the redshift range 0.0024 < z < 0.3500 and in the dynamical mass range 9.5 < log(M) < 12.5 are: (i) a significant part of the intrinsic dispersion of the distribution of dynamical versus stellar mass is due to redshift; (ii) the difference between dynamical and stellar mass increases as a function of dynamical mass and decreases as a function of redshift; (iii) the difference between dynamical and stellar mass goes from approximately 0 to 70 per cent of the dynamical mass depending on mass and redshift; (iv) these differences could be due to dark matter or a non-universal IMF or a combination of both; (v) the amount of dark matter inside ETGs would be equal to or less than the difference between dynamical and stellar mass depending on the impact of the IMF on the stellar mass estimation; (vi) the previous results go in the same direction of some results of the Fundamental Plane (FP) found in the literature in the sense that they could be interpreted as an increase of dark matter along the FP and a dependence of the FP on redshift.