The evolution of early-type galaxies in clusters from z~ 0.8 to z~ 0:
  the ellipticity distribution and the morphological mix
  We present the ellipticity distribution and its evolution for early-type
galaxies in clusters from z~0.8 to z~0, based on the WIde-field Nearby
Galaxy-cluster Survey (WINGS)(0.04<z<0.07), and the ESO Distant Cluster Survey
(EDisCS)(0.4<z<0.8). We first investigate a mass limited sample and we find
that, above a fixed mass limit, the ellipticity distribution of early-types
noticeably evolves with redshift. In the local Universe there are
proportionally more galaxies with higher ellipticity, hence flatter, than in
distant clusters. This evolution is due partly to the change of the mass
distribution and mainly to the change of the morphological mix with z (among
the early types, the fraction of ellipticals goes from ~70% at high to ~40% at
low-z). Analyzing separately the ellipticity distribution of the different
morphological types, we find no evolution both for ellipticals and S0s.
However, for ellipticals a change with redshift in the median value of the
distributions is detected. This is due to a larger population of very round
(e<0.05) elliptical galaxies at low-z. To compare our finding to previous
studies, we also assemble a magnitude-"delimited" sample that consists of
early-type galaxies on the red sequence with -19.3>M_B+1.208z>-21. Analyzing
this sample, we do not recover exactly the same results of the mass-limited
sample. Hence the selection criteria are crucial to characterize the galaxy
properties: the choice of the magnitude-delimited sample implies the loss of
many less massive galaxies and so it biases the final results. Moreover,
although we are adopting the same selection criteria, our results in the
magnitude-delimited sample are also not in agreement with those of Holden et
al.(2009). This is due to the fact that our and their low-z samples have a
different magnitude distribution because the Holden et al.(2009) sample suffers
from incompleteness at faint magnitudes.
