Early-type galaxies in the SDSS Stripe82

Standard-depth (~51s exposure) multicolour galaxy images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) are combined with the significantly (~2mag) deeper monochromatic images from the public SDSS Stripe82 (-50{deg}<{alpha}<59{deg}, -1.25{deg}<{delta}<1.25{deg}) to extract, through careful visual inspection, a robust sample of nearby (z<0.05), luminous (M_r_<-20.5) ETGs, including a subset of ~70 peculiar systems. ~18% of ETGs exhibit signs of disturbed morphologies (e.g. shells), while ~7% show evidence of dust lanes and patches.

An analysis of optical emission-line ratios indicates that the fraction of peculiar ETGs that are Seyferts or LINERs (19.4%) is twice the corresponding values in their relaxed counterparts (10.1%). LINER-like emission is the dominant type of nebular activity in all ETG classes, plausibly driven by stellar photoionization associated with recent star formation. An analysis of ultraviolet-optical colours indicates that, regardless of the luminosity range being considered, the fraction of peculiar ETGs that have experienced star formation in the last Gyr is a factor of ~1.5 higher than that in their relaxed counterparts.