Stellar masses of SDSS-III/BOSS galaxies at z ∼ 0.5 and constraints to galaxy formation models

By C. Maraston, J. Pforr, B. Henriques, D. Thomas, D. Wake, J. Brownstein, D. Capozzi, J. Tinker, K. Bundy, R. Skibba and 20 more. 2012

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We calculate stellar masses for ∼400 000 massive luminous galaxies at redshift ∼0.2–0.7 using the first two years of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Stellar masses are obtained by fitting model spectral energy distributions to u, g, r, i, z magnitudes, and simulations with mock galaxies are used to understand how well the templates recover the stellar mass. Accurate BOSS spectroscopic redshifts are used to constrain the fits. We find that the distribution of stellar masses in BOSS is narrow (Δlog M ∼ 0.5 dex) and peaks at about log M/M⊙ ∼ 11.3 (for a Kroupa initial stellar mass function), and that the mass sampling is uniform over the redshift range 0.2–0.6, in agreement with the intended BOSS target selection. The galaxy masses probed by BOSS extend over ∼1012 M⊙, providing unprecedented measurements of the high-mass end of the galaxy mass function. We find that the galaxy number density above ∼2.5 × 1011 M⊙ agrees with previous determinations. We perform a comparison with semi-analytic galaxy formation models tailored to the BOSS target selection and volume, in order to contain incompleteness. The abundance of massive galaxies in the models compare fairly well with the BOSS data, but the models lack galaxies at the massive end. Moreover, no evolution with redshift is detected from ∼0.6 to 0.4 in the data, whereas the abundance of massive galaxies in the models increases to redshift zero. Additionally, BOSS data display colour–magnitude (mass) relations similar to those found in the local Universe, where the most massive galaxies are the reddest. On the other hand, the model colours do not display a dependence on stellar mass, span a narrower range and are typically bluer than the observations. We argue that the lack of a colour–mass relation for massive galaxies in the models is mostly due to metallicity, which is too low in the models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c4ef88aeb2c2d45845accef76bea24c695a30a3e

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Citations in the corpus

The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological implications of the full shape of the clustering wedges in the data release 10 and 11 galaxy samples (2013, unknown): “The CMASS sample is approximately complete down to a limiting stellar mass of M 1011.3 M (Maraston et al. 2013), and has an ∼10 per cent satellite fraction (White et al. 2011; Nuza et al. 2013).”
SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 12: galaxy target selection and large-scale structure catalogues (2015, methodology): “The templates are derived from a restframe principal-component analysis (PCA) of training samples of galaxies, quasars and stars using stellar population templates at the BOSS resolution (from Maraston et al. 2013).”
Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, methodology): “When focussing on mass estimation, the conservative choice of neglecting dust as an additional parameter in the spectral fitting may lead to a more robust determination of stellar mass (Maraston et al. 2012).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: modelling the clustering and halo occupation distribution of BOSS CMASS galaxies in the Final Data Release (2015, methodology): “The Portsmouth DR12 catalogue has the SMF that is different from SMF of previous surveys (Maraston et al. 2013).”
Age-dating luminous red galaxies observed with the Southern African Large Telescope (2016, unknown): “Furthermore, we obtained average ages and masses consistent with the average ages and masses of passive LRGs obtained in Maraston et al. (2013); see their Figures 5 and 6.”
THE TENTH DATA RELEASE OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FIRST SPECTROSCOPIC DATA FROM THE SDSS-III APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY GALACTIC EVOLUTION EXPERIMENT (2013, methodology): ““Portsmouth” stellar masses derived from spectroscopic redshifts plus the SDSS imaging ugriz (Maraston et al. 2013); 2.”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications of the configuration-space clustering wedges (2016, methodology): “The CMASS sample is approximately complete down to a limiting stellar mass of M 1011.3 M for z > 0.45 (Maraston et al. 2013), with an ∼10 per cent satellite fraction (White et al. 2011; Nuza et al. 2013).”
Lensing is Low: Cosmology, Galaxy Formation, or New Physics? (2016, methodology): “To perform SHAM, Rodrı́guezTorres et al. (2016) compute the galaxy SMF using stellar masses from the Portsmouth DR12 catalogue (Maraston et al. 2013).”
A 6% measurement of the Hubble parameter at z∼0.45: direct evidence of the epoch of cosmic re-acceleration (2016, background): “[18]), and further divided in bin of velocity dispersion, which is a proxy for stellar mass.”
Galaxy Interactions Trigger Rapid Black Hole Growth: an unprecedented view from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “…Catalog (complete to r < 17.77), the SDSS-DR12 BOSS survey (color-selected galaxies, and approximately stellar mass limited; see Dawson et al. 2013; Maraston et al. 2013; Reid et al. 2016; Leauthaud et al. 2016), the GAMA-DR2 survey (complete to r < 19.0), the PRIMUS survey (complete to i < 22.5;…”