The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: modeling of the luminosity and colour dependence in the Data Release 10

Citation:

Guo H, Zheng Z, Zehavi I, Xu H, Eisenstein DJ, Weinberg DH, Bahcall NA, Berlind AA, Comparat J, McBride CK, et al. The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: modeling of the luminosity and colour dependence in the Data Release 10. ArXiv e-prints. 2014;1401 :3009.

Abstract:

We investigate the luminosity and colour dependence of clustering ofCMASS galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III Baryon OscillationSpectroscopic Survey Tenth Data Release. The halo occupationdistribution framework is adopted to model the projected two-pointcorrelation function measurements on small and intermediate scales (from$0.02$ to $60\,h^{-1}{\rm {Mpc}}$) and to interpret the observed trendsand infer the connection of galaxies to dark matter halos. We find thatluminous red galaxies reside in massive halos of mass$M{\sim}10^{13}$--$10^{14}\,h^{-1}{\rm M_\odot}$ and more luminousgalaxies are more clustered and hosted by more massive halos. The strongsmall-scale clustering requires a fraction of these galaxies to besatellites in massive halos, with the fraction at the level of 5--8 percent and decreasing with luminosity. The characteristic mass of a halohosting on average one satellite galaxy above a luminosity threshold isabout a factor $8.7$ larger than that of a halo hosting a central galaxyabove the same threshold. At a fixed luminosity, progressively reddergalaxies are more strongly clustered on small scales, which can beexplained by having a larger fraction of these galaxies in the form ofsatellites in massive halos. Our clustering measurements on scales below$0.4\,h^{-1}{\rm {Mpc}}$ allow us to study the small-scale spatialdistribution of satellites inside halos. While the clustering ofluminosity-threshold samples can be well described by aNavarro-Frenk-White (NFW) profile, that of the reddest galaxies prefersa steeper or more concentrated profile. Finally, we also use galaxysamples of constant number density at different redshifts to study theevolution of luminous galaxies, and find the clustering to be consistentwith passive evolution in the redshift range of $0.5 \lesssim z \lesssim0.6$.

Notes:

17 pages, 13 figures. Submitted to MNRAS. Comments are welcome

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