Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): the GAMA galaxy group catalogue (G3Cv1)

By A. Robotham, P. Norberg, S. Driver, I. Baldry, Steven Bamford, Andrew M. Hopkins, J. Liske, J. Loveday, A. Merson, J. Peacock and 23 more. 2011

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using the complete Galaxy and Mass Assembly I (GAMA-I) survey covering ∼142 deg2 to rAB= 19.4, of which ∼47 deg2 is to rAB= 19.8, we create the GAMA-I galaxy group catalogue (G3Cv1), generated using a friends-of-friends (FoF) based grouping algorithm. Our algorithm has been tested extensively on one family of mock GAMA lightcones, constructed from Λ cold dark matter N-body simulations populated with semi-analytic galaxies. Recovered group properties are robust to the effects of interlopers and are median unbiased in the most important respects. G3Cv1 contains 14 388 galaxy groups (with multiplicity ≥2), including 44 186 galaxies out of a possible 110 192 galaxies, implying ∼40 per cent of all galaxies are assigned to a group. The similarities of the mock group catalogues and G3Cv1 are multiple: global characteristics are in general well recovered. However, we do find a noticeable deficit in the number of high multiplicity groups in GAMA compared to the mocks. Additionally, despite exceptionally good local spatial completeness, G3Cv1 contains significantly fewer compact groups with five or more members, this effect becoming most evident for high multiplicity systems. These two differences are most likely due to limitations in the physics included of the current GAMA lightcone mock. Further studies using a variety of galaxy formation models are required to confirm their exact origin. The G3Cv1 catalogue will be made publicly available as and when the relevant GAMA redshifts are made available at http://www.gama-survey.org.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62530eb177346edb878f9fdd6a2654a56cf53f3d

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Citations in the corpus

Flux- and volume-limited groups/clusters for the SDSS galaxies: catalogues and mass estimation (2014, methodology): “In several papers (e.g. Eke et al., 2004; Berlind et al., 2006; Yang et al., 2007; Robotham et al., 2011) the mock catalogues are used to find the ‘best’ values for FoF parameters.”
Galaxy and mass assembly (GAMA): End of survey report and data release 2 (2015, methodology): “Finally, the environment of GAMA galaxies was characterized by Brough et al. (2013) using galaxy number surface density, while Robotham et al. (2011) presented the GAMA Galaxy Group Catalogue (G3C; see also Alpaslan et al. 2012).”
The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Instrument specification and target selection (2014, methodology): “We take advantage of the GAMA group catalogue (Robotham et al. 2011, which includes ∼97% of galaxies in the SAMI GAMA-region selection catalogue) to characterise the typical environments covered by our sample.”
Lightcone mock catalogues from semi-analytic models of galaxy formation – I. Construction and application to the BzK colour selection (2012, methodology): “C O distribution in order to test how faithfully the algorithm can recover these structures when working in redshift space (Eke et al. 2004; Robotham et al. 2011; Murphy et al. 2012).”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Spectroscopic analysis (2013, methodology): “Galaxy groups in GAMA have been quantified by Robotham et al. (2011), and galaxy structural parameters measured by Kelvin et al. (2012).”
GALAXY AND MASS ASSEMBLY (GAMA): MID-INFRARED PROPERTIES AND EMPIRICAL RELATIONS FROM WISE (2014, methodology): “For example, we use the updated GAMA II Galaxy Group Catalogue (G3Cv6), as detailed in Robotham et al. (2011), to isolate galaxies that reside within a pair.”