A MaxBCG Catalog of 13,823 Galaxy Clusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By Benjamin P. Koester, T. McKay, James Annis, Risa Wechsler, August E. Evrard, L. Bleem, Matthew R. Becker, D. Johnston, Erin Sheldon, R. Nichol and 15 more. 2007

485 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a catalog of galaxy clusters selected using the maxBCG red-sequence method from Sloan Digital Sky Survey photometric data. This catalog includes 13,823 clusters with velocity dispersions greater than ≈400 km s-1 and is the largest galaxy cluster catalog assembled to date. They are selected in an approximately volume-limited way from a 0.5 Gpc3 region covering 7500 deg2 of sky between redshifts 0.1 and 0.3. Each cluster contains between 10 and 190 E/S0 ridgeline galaxies brighter than 0.4L* within a scaled radius R200. The tight relation between ridgeline color and redshift provides an accurate photometric redshift estimate for every cluster. Photometric redshift errors are shown by comparison to spectroscopic redshifts to be small (Δz ≃ 0.01), essentially independent of redshift, and well determined throughout the redshift range. Runs of maxBCG on realistic mock catalogs suggest that the sample is more than 90% pure and more than 85% complete for clusters with masses ≥1 × 1014 M☉. Spectroscopic measurements of cluster members are used to examine line-of-sight projection as a contaminant in the identification of brightest cluster galaxies and cluster member galaxies. Spectroscopic data are also used to demonstrate the correlation between optical richness and velocity dispersion. Comparison to the combined NORAS and REFLEX X-ray-selected cluster catalogs shows that X-ray-luminous clusters are found among the optically richer maxBCG clusters. This paper is the first in a series that will consider the properties of these clusters, their galaxy populations, and their implications for cosmology.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4be827dc2fa81246b0b6e9c1f087da373a67974b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

THE COS-HALOS SURVEY: AN EMPIRICAL DESCRIPTION OF METAL-LINE ABSORPTION IN THE LOW-REDSHIFT CIRCUMGALACTIC MEDIUM (2012, methodology): “…the environments of our target and bonus samples, as assessed from previous analyses of SDSS spectroscopy and photometry (maxBCG cluster catalog; Koester et al. 2007), and reported that only five of the galaxies (within three QSO fields) are probable members of a massive group or galaxy…”
The pre-launch Planck Sky Model: a model of sky emission at submillimetre to centimetre wavelengths (2012, methodology): “5.2, Table 2), of the IRAS catalogue of infrared sources (Beichman et al. 1988), and of catalogues of galaxy clusters observed with ROSAT (compilation from Piffaretti et al. 2011), as well as with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, Koester et al. 2007).”
GALAXY CLUSTERS IDENTIFIED FROM THE SDSS DR6 AND THEIR PROPERTIES (2009, methodology): “The luminosity cutoff,0.4L∗, of the maxBCG method corresponds to absolute magnitude ofMr ≃ −20.6 (Koester et al. 2007b), which is about 0.4 magnitude fainter than that of our work.”
redMaPPer. I. ALGORITHM AND SDSS DR8 CATALOG (2013, methodology): “…Durret et al. 2011; Szabo et al. 2011; Soares-Santos et al. 2011; Wen et al. 2012), and those utilizing the cluster red-sequence (e.g., Annis et al. 1999; Gladders & Yee 2000; Koester et al. 2007a; Gladders et al. 2007; Gal et al. 2009; Thanjavur et al. 2009; Hao et al. 2010b; Murphy et al. 2012).”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Sunyaev-Zel'dovich selected galaxy clusters at 148 GHz from three seasons of data (2013, methodology): “From the maxBCG catalog [54], which includes optical richness measurements for clusters with 0.”
A WEAK LENSING STUDY OF X-RAY GROUPS IN THE COSMOS SURVEY: FORM AND EVOLUTION OF THE MASS–LUMINOSITY RELATION (2009, methodology): “…there are five popular methods for detecting groups and clusters of galaxies: a) optical detection via the red-sequence (e.g. Gladders & Yee 2005; Koester et al. 2007), b) detection via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect which measures the distortion of the CMB spectrum due to the hot ICM (e.g.…”
Inference of the cold dark matter substructure mass function at z = 0.2 using strong gravitational lenses (2014, result): “Finally, the external shear strength is ∼8 percent larger than the value recovered by Eichner et al. (2012) and its position angle is not consistent with their model, but it is consistent with the location of the brightest cluster galaxy of the lens environment (Koester et al. 2007).”
CARS: the CFHTLS-Archive-Research Survey. I. Five-band multi-colour data from 37 sq. deg. CFHTLS-wid (2008, background): “…al. 2004; Mantz et al. 2007) and in the optical (see e.g. Postman et al. 1996; Olsen et al. 1999; Gladders & Yee 2000; Goto et al. 2002; Bahcall et al. 2003; Gladders et al. 2007; Koester et al. 2007); see also Gal (2008) for a concise review of various cluster detection algorithms in the optical.”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “For instance, the bias of the SDSS maxBCG catalog, measured by comparing cluster photo-z’s to spectroscopic redshifts, is ≈ 0.004 (Koester et al., 2007).”
CONSTRAINING THE SCATTER IN THE MASS–RICHNESS RELATION OF maxBCG CLUSTERS WITH WEAK LENSING AND X-RAY DATA (2008, methodology): “Interested readers are referredto Koester et al. (2007a) and Koester et al. (2007b) for further details.”
Constraining primordial non-Gaussianity with future galaxy surveys (2011, unknown): “…improved our understanding of the standard model, especially thanks to the measurement of galaxy clustering and baryon acoustic oscillations (see e.g. Percival et al. 2007), but also using galaxy clusters (Koester et al. 2007) and Type Ia Supernovae (Kessler et al. 2009; Lampeitl et al. 2009).”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY COADD: 275 deg2 OF DEEP SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY IMAGING ON STRIPE 82 (2011, methodology): “We have performed a stacked cluster weak lensing analysis with the MaxBCG clusters as lenses and the coadd galaxies as sources (Simet et al. 2012).”
THE BLANCO COSMOLOGY SURVEY: DATA ACQUISITION, PROCESSING, CALIBRATION, QUALITY DIAGNOSTICS, AND DATA RELEASE (2012, background): “The SDSS MaxBCG catalog (Koester et al. 2007) has covered about 7,500 deg2 in ugriz bands and with 10 σ r band magnitude limits of about 22.35.”
A GMBCG GALAXY CLUSTER CATALOG OF 55,424 RICH CLUSTERS FROM SDSS DR7 (2010, methodology): “In this paper, we develop a Monte Carlo scheme that is similar to those used in (Goto et al. 2002; Koester et al. 2007a), but with additional features.”
Cosmological Parameters from Observations of Galaxy Clusters (2011, methodology): “The optically selected maxBCG sample (Koester et al. 2007) employed by Rozo et al. (2010) probes a different part of the cluster population; it is restricted to lower redshifts than the X-ray samples described above (0.1 < z < 0.3), but extends to lower masses (M500 > 7 × 10 13 M⊙).”
What determines satellite galaxy disruption (2009, background): “For example, for rich clusters in the SDSS MaxBCG catalog, the median offset between the BCG and X-ray center is 58h−1 kpc (Koester et al. 2007).”