The impact of accurate distances to dwarf elliptical galaxies on cosmology

Abstract

The Surface Brightness Fluctuation method has been shown to be a powerful distance indicator for dwarf elliptical galaxies to very low surface brightness levels. It is applicable to stellar systems that are out of reach for classical indicators requiring resolved stellar populations such as the tip magnitude of the red giant branch. I briefly discuss a few results from recent SBF studies of dEs to demonstrate the significance of the SBF method to address long-standing issues related to cosmography, dark matter in galaxy groups, substructures in clusters, and the discrepancy between the mass function of collapsed objects and the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function. For the analysis of the large number of galaxy images that need to be processed as part of such SBF studies we are currently developing a fast, semi-automatic reduction pipeline that will be made readily available to the astronomical community.