No Arabic abstract
We present a new suite of mock galaxy catalogs mimicking the low-redshift Universe, based on an updated halo occupation distribution (HOD) model and a scaling relation between optical properties and the neutral hydrogen (HI) content of galaxies. Our algorithm is constrained by observations of the luminosity function and luminosity- and colour-dependent clustering of SDSS galaxies, as well as the HI mass function and HI-dependent clustering of massive HI-selected galaxies in the ALFALFA survey. Mock central and satellite galaxies with realistic values of $r$-band luminosity, $g-r$ and $u-r$ colour, stellar mass and HI mass are populated in an $N$-body simulation, inheriting a number of properties of the density and tidal environment of their host halos. The host halo of each central galaxy is also `baryonified with realistic spatial distributions of stars as well as hot and cold gas, along with the corresponding rotation curve. Our default HOD assumes that galaxy properties are a function of group halo mass alone, and can optionally include effects such as galactic conformity and colour-dependent galaxy assembly bias. The mocks predict the relation between the stellar mass and HI mass of massive HI galaxies, as well as the 2-point cross-correlation function of spatially co-located optical and HI-selected samples. They enable novel null tests for galaxy assembly bias, provide predictions for the HI velocity width function, and clarify the origin and universality of the radial acceleration relation in the $Lambda$CDM framework.
We apply a halo-based group finder to four large redshift surveys, the 2MRS, 6dFGS, SDSS and 2dFGRS, to construct group catalogs in the low-redshift Universe. The group finder is based on that of Yang et al. but with an improved halo mass assignment so that it can be applied uniformly to various redshift surveys of galaxies. Halo masses are assigned to groups according to proxies based on the stellar mass/luminosity of member galaxies. The performances of the group finder in grouping galaxies according to common halos and in halo mass assignments are tested using realistic mock samples constructed from hydrodynamical simulations and empirical models of galaxy occupation in dark matter halos. Our group finder finds $sim 94%$ of the correct true member galaxies for $90-95%$ of the groups in the mock samples; the halo masses assigned by the group finder are un-biased with respect to the true halo masses, and have a typical uncertainty of $sim0.2,{rm dex}$. The properties of group catalogs constructed from the observational samples are described and compared with other similar catalogs in the literature.
Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) is a model giving the average number of galaxies in a dark matter halo, function of its mass and other intrinsic properties, like distance from halo center, luminosity and redshift of its constituting galaxies. It is believed that these parameters could also be related to the galaxy history of formation. We want to investigate more this relation in order to test and better refine this model. To do that, we extract HOD indicators from EUCLID mock catalogs for different luminosity cuts and for redshifts ranges going from 0.1 < z < 3.0. We study and interpret the trends of indicators function of these variations and tried to retrace galaxy formation history following the idea that galaxy evolution is the combination rather than the conflict of the two main proposed ideas nowadays: the older hierarchical mass merger driven paradigm and the recent downsizing star formation driven approach.
We develop empirical methods for modeling the galaxy population and populating cosmological N-body simulations with mock galaxies according to the observed properties of galaxies in survey data. We use these techniques to produce a new set of mock catalogs for the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey based on the output of the high-resolution Bolshoi simulation, as well as two other simulations with different cosmological parameters, all of which we release for public use. The mock-catalog creation technique uses subhalo abundance matching to assign galaxy luminosities to simulated dark-matter halos. It then adds color information to the resulting mock galaxies in a manner that depends on the local galaxy density, in order to reproduce the measured color-environment relation in the data. In the course of constructing the catalogs, we test various models for including scatter in the relation between halo mass and galaxy luminosity, within the abundance-matching framework. We find that there is no constant-scatter model that can simultaneously reproduce both the luminosity function and the autocorrelation function of DEEP2. This result has implications for galaxy-formation theory, and it restricts the range of contexts in which the mocks can be usefully applied. Nevertheless, careful comparisons show that our new mocks accurately reproduce a wide range of the other properties of the DEEP2 catalog, suggesting that they can be used to gain a detailed understanding of various selection effects in DEEP2.
The number density and correlation function of galaxies are two key quantities to characterize the distribution of the observed galaxy population. High-$z$ spectroscopic surveys, which usually involve complex target selection and are incomplete in redshift sampling, present both opportunities and challenges to measure these quantities reliably in the high-$z$ Universe. Using realistic mock catalogs we show that target selection and redshift incompleteness can lead to significantly biased results. We develop methods to correct such bias, using information provided by the parent photometric data from which the spectroscopic sample is constructed. Our tests using realistic mock samples show that our methods are able to reproduce the true stellar mass function and correlation function reliably. As applications, mock catalogs are constructed for two high-z surveys: the existing zCOSMOS-bright galaxy sample and the forthcoming PFS galaxy evolution survey. We apply our methods to the zCOSMOS-bright sample and make comparisons with results obtained before. The same set of mock samples are used to quantify cosmic variances expected for different sample sizes. We find that, for both number density and correlation function, the relative error due to cosmic variance in the PFS galaxy survey will be reduced by a factor of 3-4 when compared to zCOSMOS.
We present the Census of the Local Universe (CLU) narrow-band survey to search for emission-line (ha) galaxies. CLU-ha~has imaged $approx$3$pi$ of the sky (26,470~deg$^2$) with 4 narrow-band filters that probe a distance out to 200~Mpc. We have obtained spectroscopic follow-up for galaxy candidates in 14 preliminary fields (101.6~deg$^2$) to characterize the limits and completeness of the survey. In these preliminary fields, CLU can identify emission lines down to an ha~flux limit of $10^{-14}$~$rm{erg~s^{-1}~cm^{-2}}$ at 90% completeness, and recovers 83% (67%) of the ha~flux from catalogued galaxies in our search volume at the $Sigma$=2.5 ($Sigma$=5) color excess levels. The contamination from galaxies with no emission lines is 61% (12%) for $Sigma$=2.5 ($Sigma$=5). Also, in the regions of overlap between our preliminary fields and previous emission-line surveys, we recover the majority of the galaxies found in previous surveys and identify an additional $approx$300 galaxies. In total, we find 90 galaxies with no previous distance information, several of which are interesting objects: 7 blue compact dwarfs, 1 green pea, and a Seyfert galaxy; we also identified a known planetary nebula. These objects show that the CLU-ha~survey can be a discovery machine for objects in our own Galaxy and extreme galaxies out to intermediate redshifts. However, the majority of the CLU-ha~galaxies identified in this work show properties consistent with normal star-forming galaxies. CLU-ha~galaxies with new redshifts will be added to existing galaxy catalogs to focus the search for the electromagnetic counterpart to gravitational wave events.