The distribution of stellar mass in the low‐redshift Universe

By Cheng Li, Simon D. M. White. 2009

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We use a complete and uniform sample of almost half a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to characterize the distribution of stellar mass in the low-redshift Universe. Galaxy abundances are well determined over almost four orders of magnitude in stellar mass and are reasonably but not perfectly fit by a Schechter function with characteristic stellar mass m(*) = 6.7 x 1010 M(circle dot) and with faint-end slope alpha = -1.155. For a standard cosmology and a standard stellar initial mass function, only 3.5 per cent of the baryons in the low-redshift Universe are locked up in stars. The projected autocorrelation function of stellar mass is robustly and precisely determined for r(p) < 30 h-1 Mpc. Over the range 10 h-1 kpc < r(p) < 10 h-1 Mpc, it is extremely well represented by a power law. The corresponding three-dimensional autocorrelation function is xi*(r) = (r/6.1 h-1 Mpc)-1.84. Relative to the dark matter, the bias of the stellar mass distribution is approximately constant on large scales, but varies by a factor of 5 for r(p) < 1 h-1 Mpc. This behaviour is approximately but not perfectly reproduced by current models for galaxy formation in the concordance Lambda cold dark matter cosmology. Detailed comparison suggests that a fluctuation amplitude Sigma(8) similar to 0.8 is preferred to the somewhat larger value adopted in the Millennium Simulation models with which we compare our data. This comparison also suggests that observations of stellar mass autocorrelations as a function of redshift might provide a powerful test for the nature of Dark Energy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5210ad4ed908950dbd02bd66ce6805802d9b67d9

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Citations in the corpus

Erratum: From dwarf spheroidals to cD galaxies: simulating the galaxy population in a ΛCDM cosmology (2010, methodology): “The Baldry et al. (2008) results suggest that this may reflect the onset of incompleteness effects at the lowest masses considered by Li & White (2009).”
THE CENTRAL SLOPE OF DARK MATTER CORES IN DWARF GALAXIES: SIMULATIONS VERSUS THINGS (2010, methodology): “It has been found that galaxies of smaller or larger halo masses with respect to the Milky Way appear to have inefficient star formation (Navarro & Steinmetz 2000; Governato et al. 2007; Li & White 2009).”
Galaxy formation in WMAP1 and WMAP7 cosmologies (2012, methodology): “5 compares model stellar mass functions for the WMAP1 (dashed) and WMAP7 (solid) cosmologies to the observational data from Li & White (2009) and Baldry et al. (2008) which we have fitted.”
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN GALAXIES AND DARK MATTER STRUCTURES IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2012, methodology): “…tothis input, for consistency with the group catalog, we use the exact stellar mass function of galaxies in the corresponding volumelimited sample to perform the abundance matching instead of using the global relations in the literature (e.g. Li & White 2009; Yang et al. 2009; Baldry et al. 2012).”
Is there a "too big to fail" problem in the field? (2014, background): “They argued that, based on the number density of galaxies measured by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (e.g. Baldry et al. 2008; Li & White 2009), virtually all galaxies in aΛCDM universe should be hosted by halos with Mvir & 1010 M⊙.”
Mass models of the Milky Way (2011, methodology): “…et al. (2010) compared the distribution of halo virial masses found in the Millennium and MillenniumII simulations (Springel et al. 2005; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009) to the distribution of galaxy stellar masses found by Li & White (2009) using Sloan Digital Sky Survey data (Abazajian et al. 2009).”
Evolution of galaxy stellar masses and star formation rates in the eagle simulations (2014, methodology): “Around redshift 0.1 we show data from Baldry et al. (2012) (GAMA survey), Li & White (2009) (SDSS), Gilbank et al. (2010b) (Stripe82 - SDSS) and Moustakas et al. (2013) (PRIMUS).”
The BAHAMAS project: Calibrated hydrodynamical simulations for large-scale structure cosmology (2016, methodology): “1 shows that the cosmo-OWLS models consistently have too few galaxies with log10[M∗/M⊙] 11 compared to recent SDSS and GAMA observations.”
Galactic star formation and accretion histories from matching galaxies to dark matter haloes (2012, methodology): “We employ the recent measurements by Li & White (2009), based on a complete and uniform sample from the SDSS/DR7 (Abazajian et al. 2009), and we use the conversion to stellar mass based on the SDSS r-band model luminosities, as derived by Guo et al. (2010).”
Simulations of the galaxy population constrained by observations from z = 3 to the present day: implications for galactic winds and the fate of their ejecta (2012, background): “These surveys are Baldry, Glazebrook & Driver (2008) and Li & White (2009) at z = 0, and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS)-MUSIC (Fontana et al. 2006), Spitzer (Pérez-González et al. 2008), Marchesini et al. (2009), Spitzer-Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS; Ilbert et al. 2010),…”
The kinematic connection between galaxies and dark matter haloes (2010, background): “The differences between masses from Bell et al. (2003), Kauffmann et al. (2003), and Blanton & Roweis (2007) are based on the comparison made in Appendix A in Li & White (2009).”
Stellar masses of SDSS-III/BOSS galaxies at z ∼ 0.5 and constraints to galaxy formation models (2012, methodology): “Li & White (2009) find a 0.1 dex offset between stellar masses of SDSS galaxies as derived by Kauffman et al. (2003) and Blanton et al. (2007).”
THE VELOCITY WIDTH FUNCTION OF GALAXIES FROM THE 40% ALFALFA SURVEY: SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE COLD DARK MATTER OVERABUNDANCE PROBLEM (2011, background): “…halo masses predicted by CDM, are raised by the flatness of the galactic luminosity function (LF, Blanton et al. 2005; Montero-Dorta & Prada 2009), HI mass function (HIMF, Martin et al. 2010) and galactic stellar mass function (GSMF, Baldry et al. 2008; Li & White 2009) at their faint/low-mass end.”
Galaxy evolution in groups and clusters: satellite star formation histories and quenching time-scales in a hierarchical Universe (2012, methodology): “We use SHAM to assign stellar mass to subhalos at each redshift, using the SMF from SDSS (Li & White 2009) at z = 0.1 and from COSMOS (Drory et al. 2009) at z = 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9, assuming 0.15 dex Mstar−Mmax scatter in all cases.”
The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments (2014, methodology): “The simulation results are compared with observations from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey (Baldry et al. 2012; open circles) and from SDSS (Li & White 2009; filled circles).”
PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, methodology): “We plot the SDSS-GALEX SMF using filled black squares, and the results from Cole et al. (2001), Bell et al. (2003), Li & White (2009), and Baldry et al. (2012) using orange diamonds, red circles, green triangles, and blue squares, respectively.”