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Register a new userLuminous Red Galaxies in Clusters: Central Occupation, Spatial Distributions, and Mis-centering
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Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are considered among the best understood samples of galaxies, and they are employed in a broad range of cosmological studies. Because they form a relatively homogeneous population, with high stellar masses and red colors, they are expected to occupy halos in a relatively simple way. In this paper, we study how LRGs occupy massive halos via direct counts in clusters and we reveal several unexpected trends suggesting that the connection between LRGs and dark matter halos may not be straightforward. Using the redMaPPer cluster catalog, we derive the central occupation of LRGs as a function richness, Ncen({lambda}). Assuming no correlation between cluster mass and central galaxy luminosity at fixed richness, we show that clusters contain a significantly lower fraction of central LRGs than predicted from the two-point correlation function. At halo masses of 10^14.5 Msun, we find Ncen=0.73, compared to Ncen of 0.89 from correlation studies. Our central occupation function for LRGs converges to 0.95 at large halo masses. A strong anti-correlation between central luminosity and cluster mass at fixed richness is required to reconcile our results with those based on clustering studies. We also derive P_BNC, the probability that the brightest cluster member is not the central galaxy. We find P_BNC ~ 20-30% which is a factor of ~2 lower than the value found by Skibba et al. 2011. Finally, we study the radial offsets of bright non-central LRGs from cluster centers and show that bright non-central LRGs follow a different radial distribution compared to red cluster members, which follow a Navarro-Frank-White profile. This work demonstrates that even the most massive clusters do not always have an LRG at the center, and that the brightest galaxy in a cluster is not always the central galaxy.
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We perform Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) modeling to interpret small-scale and intermediate-scale clustering of 35,000 luminous early-type galaxies and their cross-correlation with a reference imaging sample of normal L* galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The modeling results show that most of these luminous red galaxies (LRGs) are central galaxies residing in massive halos of typical mass M ~ a few times 10^13 to 10^14 Msun/h, while a few percent of them have to be satellites within halos in order to produce the strong auto-correlations exhibited on smaller scales. The mean luminosity Lc of central LRGs increases with the host halo mass, with a rough scaling relation of Lc propto M^0.5. The halo mass required to host on average one satellite LRG above a luminosity threshold is found to be about 10 times higher than that required to host a central LRG above the same threshold. We find that in massive halos the distribution of L* galaxies roughly follows that of the dark matter and their mean occupation number scales with halo mass as M^1.5. The HOD modeling results also allows for an intuitive understanding of the scale-dependent luminosity dependence of the cross-correlation between LRGs and L_* galaxies. Constraints on the LRG HOD provide tests to models of formation and evolution of massive galaxies, and they are also useful for cosmological parameter investigations. In one of the appendices, we provide LRG HOD parameters with dependence on cosmology inferred from modeling the two-point auto-correlation functions of LRGs.
We develop a novel abundance matching method to construct a mock catalog of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) in SDSS, using catalogs of halos and subhalos in N-body simulations for a LCDM model. Motivated by observations suggesting that LRGs are passively-evolving, massive early-type galaxies with a typical age >5Gyr, we assume that simulated halos at z=2 (z2-halo) are progenitors for LRG-host subhalos observed today, and we label the most tightly bound particles in each progenitor z2-halo as LRG ``stars. We then identify the subhalos containing these stars to z=0.3 (SDSS redshift) in descending order of the masses of z2-halos until the comoving number density of the matched subhalos becomes comparable to the measured number density of SDSS LRGs, n=10^{-4} (h/Mpc)^3. Once the above prescription is determined, our only free parameter is the number density of halos identified at z=2 and this parameter is fixed to match the observed number density at z = 0.3. By tracing subsequent merging and assembly histories of each progenitor z2-halo, we can directly compute, from the mock catalog, the distributions of central and satellite LRGs and their internal motions in each host halo at z=0.3. While the SDSS LRGs are galaxies selected by the magnitude and color cuts from the SDSS images and are not necessarily a stellar-mass-selected sample, our mock catalog reproduces a host of SDSS measurements: the halo occupation distribution for central and satellite LRGs, the projected auto-correlation function of LRGs, the cross-correlation of LRGs with shapes of background galaxies (LRG-galaxy weak lensing), and the nonlinear redshift-space distortion effect, the Finger-of-God effect, in the angle-averaged redshift-space power spectrum.
The center determination of a galaxy cluster from an optical cluster finding algorithm can be offset from theoretical prescriptions or $N$-body definitions of its host halo center. These offsets impact the recovered cluster statistics, affecting both richness measurements and the weak lensing shear profile around the clusters. This paper models the centering performance of the RM~cluster finding algorithm using archival X-ray observations of RM-selected clusters. Assuming the X-ray emission peaks as the fiducial halo centers, and through analyzing their offsets to the RM~centers, we find that $sim 75pm 8 %$ of the RM~clusters are well centered and the mis-centered offset follows a Gamma distribution in normalized, projected distance. These mis-centering offsets cause a systematic underestimation of cluster richness relative to the well-centered clusters, for which we propose a descriptive model. Our results enable the DES Y1 cluster cosmology analysis by characterizing the necessary corrections to both the weak lensing and richness abundance functions of the DES Y1 redMaPPer cluster catalog.
We present a detection of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) decrement associated with the Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG) sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The SZ data come from 148 GHz maps of the equatorial region made by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). The LRG sample is divided by luminosity into four bins, and estimates for the central Sunyaev-Zeldovich temperature decrement are calculated through a stacking process. We detect and account for a bias of the SZ signal due to weak radio sources. We use numerical simulations to relate the observed decrement to Y200 and clustering properties to relate the galaxy luminosity bins to mass. We also use a relation between brightest cluster galaxy luminosity and cluster mass based on stacked gravitational lensing measurements to estimate the characteristic halo masses. The masses are found to be around 1e14 M_sun.
In this work I discuss the necessary steps for deriving photometric redshifts for luminous red galaxies (LRGs) and galaxy clusters through simple empirical methods. The data used is from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). I show that with three bands only ({it gri}) it is possible to achieve results as accurate as the ones obtained by other techniques, generally based on more filters. In particular, the use of the $(g-i)$ color helps improving the final redshifts (especially for clusters), as this color monotonically increases up to $z sim 0.8$. For the LRGs I generate a catalog of $sim 1.5$ million objects at $z < 0.70$. The accuracy of this catalog is $sigma = 0.027$ for $z le 0.55$ and $sigma = 0.049$ for $0.55 < z le 0.70$. The photometric redshift technique employed for clusters is independent of a cluster selection algorithm. Thus, it can be applied to systems selected by any method or wavelength, as long as the proper optical photometry is available. When comparing the redshift listed in literature to the photometric estimate, the accuracy achieved for clusters is $sigma = 0.024$ for $z le 0.30$ and $sigma = 0.037$ for $030 < z le 0.55$. However, when considering the spectroscopic redshift as the mean value of SDSS galaxies on each cluster region, the accuracy is at the same level as found by other authors: $sigma = 0.011$ for $z le 0.30$ and $sigma = 0.016$ for $030 < z le 0.55$. The photometric redshift relation derived here is applied to thousands of cluster candidates selected elsewhere. I have also used galaxy photometric redshifts available in SDSS to identify groups in redshift space and then compare the redshift peak of the nearest group to each cluster redshift (ABRIDGED).
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