A halo-based galaxy group finder: calibration and application to the 2dFGRS

By Xiaohu Yang, H. Mo, F. V. D. Bosch, Yipeng Jing. 2004

344 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use the halo occupation model to calibrate galaxy group finders in magnitude limited redshift surveys. Because, according to the current scenario of structure formation, galaxy groups are associated with cold dark matter (CDM) haloes, we make use of the properties of the halo population in the design of our group finder. The method starts with an assumed mass-to-light ratio to assign a tentative mass to each group. This mass is used to estimate the size and velocity dispersion of the underlying halo that hosts the group, which in turn is used to determine group membership (in redshift space). This procedure is repeated until no further changes occur in group memberships. We find that the final groups selected this way are insensitive to the mass-to-light ratio assumed. We use mock catalogues, constructed using the conditional luminosity function (CLF), to test the performance of our group finder in terms of completeness of true members and contamination by interlopers. Our group finder is more successful than the conventional friends-of-friends (FOF) group finder in assigning galaxies in common dark matter haloes to a single group. We apply our group finder to the 2-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) and compare the resulting group properties with model predictions based on the CLF. For the CDM concordance cosmology, we find a clear discrepancy between the model and data in the sense that the model predicts too many rich groups. In order to match the observational results, we have to either increase the mass-to-light ratios of rich clusters to a level significantly higher than current observational estimates, or to assume sigma(8) similar or equal to 0.7, compared with the concordance value of 0.9.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d16d469f09f86f7c3903c99924d1db9167c09d0a

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Citations in the corpus

A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies. II. Formation of Red Ellipticals (2007, background): “…of local density (1þ r; defined as the galaxy number density within a radius r relative to the mean number density in that radius) on various scales, in narrow bins of total group luminosity (which should be a good proxy for group halo mass; see Yang et al. 2005; van den Bosch et al. 2006).”
The alignment between the distribution of satellites and the orientation of their central galaxy (2006, methodology): “…especially in clusters, appears to be more centrally concentrated and not as strongly anti-biased as this predicted distribution of subhaloes (Carlberg, Yee & Ellingson 1997; van den Marel et al. 2000; Lin, Mohr & Stanford 2004; van den Bosch et al. 2005; Yang et al. 2005c; Chen et al. 2005).”
Galaxy Groups Within 3500 km s−1 (2017, background): “One variant is to base expectations on N-body simulations (Yang et al. 2005; Weinmann et al. 2006).”
THE SPIN AND ORIENTATION OF DARK MATTER HALOS WITHIN COSMIC FILAMENTS (2009, methodology): “One may also use models for the density profile and velocity dispersion of dark matter halos to help extracting galaxy groups (e.g., Yang et al. 2005).”
Properties of galaxy groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – I. The dependence of colour, star formation and morphology on halo mass (2005, methodology): “…the two-point correlation function of groups (Yang et al. 2005b), the galaxy occupation statistics of dark matter haloes (Yang et al. 2005c), the phase-space parameters of brightest halo galaxies (van den Bosch et al. 2005b) and the crosscorrelation between galaxies and groups (Yang et al. 2005d).”
GALAXY GROUPS IN THE SDSS DR4. III. THE LUMINOSITY AND STELLAR MASS FUNCTIONS (2008, methodology): “With a welldefined galaxy group catalogue, one can then not only study the properties of galaxies in different groups (e.g. Y05c; Yang et al. 2005d; Collister & Lahav 2005; van den Bosch et al. 2005; Robotham et al. 2006; Zandivarez et al. 2006; Weinmann et al. 2006a,b; van den Bosch et al. 2008;…”
Theoretical Models of the Halo Occupation Distribution: Separating Central and Satellite Galaxies (2004, methodology): “…the high mass end of 〈N〉M constrained by the group multiplicity function (e.g., Peacock & Smith 2000; Marinoni & Hudson 2002; Kochanek et al. 2003; Yang et al 2005b; A. Berlind, et al., in preparation), we can use the correlation function and other clustering statistics to investigate the…”
Groups of Galaxies in the Two Micron All Sky Redshift Survey (2006, methodology): “Yang et al. (2005) have developed a halo-based group-finder and successfully applied it to the 2dFGRS sample (Merchán & Zandivarez 2002; Eke et al. 2004).”
AN ALMA SURVEY OF SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES IN THE EXTENDED CHANDRA DEEP FIELD SOUTH: THE REDSHIFT DISTRIBUTION AND EVOLUTION OF SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES (2013, methodology): “We use the halo mass catalogs from Yang et al. (2005), and find that these ellipticals have a typical halo mass of 0.5 × 1013 M⊙ with a 1–σ range of 0.1– 8 × 1013 M⊙.”
The correlation of star formation quenching with internal galaxy properties and environment (2008, methodology): “Here, we make use of a large galaxy group catalogue constructed from the SDSS using the halo-based galaxy group finder developed by Yang et al. (2005).”
A primer on hierarchical galaxy formation: the semi-analytical approach (2006, methodology): “Direct observational evidence for this has been obtained using group catalogues derived from the two-degree field galaxy redshift survey (Eke et al. 2006; Yang et al. 2005).”
MASS AND ENVIRONMENT AS DRIVERS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION. II. THE QUENCHING OF SATELLITE GALAXIES AS THE ORIGIN OF ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS (2011, methodology): “It applies a rather sophisticated iterative algorithm, calibrated on mock catalogues (see Yang et al. 2005), to the NYU Value-Added Galaxy Catalog (NYU-VAGC, Blanton et al. 2005), which is also based on the SDSS DR7 sample.”
A CATALOG OF 132,684 CLUSTERS OF GALAXIES IDENTIFIED FROM SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY III (2012, methodology): “Galaxy clusters have been found from single-band optical imaging data (e.g., Abell 1958; Postman et al. 1996), multicolor photometric data (e.g., Gladders & Yee 2005; Koester et al. 2007a) and spectroscopic redshift surveys (e.g., Huchra & Geller 1982; Yang et al. 2005).”
Galaxy Groups in the SDSS DR4. I. The Catalog and Basic Properties (2007, methodology): “In a recent paper, Yang et al. (2005a) developed a halobased group finder that is optimized for grouping galaxies that reside in the same dark matter halo.”
A MaxBCG Catalog of 13,823 Galaxy Clusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2007, background): “…in their full environment of filaments and voids, and provide realistic estimates of both the spatial and dynamical structure of the cluster galaxy population (White et al. 2002; Kochanek et al. 2003; Eke et al. 2004; Miller et al. 2005; Yang et al. 2005; Gerke et al. 2005; Wechsler et al. 2006).”
Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): the GAMA galaxy group catalogue (G3Cv1) (2011, background): “…Abell 1958; Zwicky et al. 1961), but more recently significant effort has been devoted to robustly detecting grouped structures (e.g. Huchra & Geller 1982; Moore, Frenk & White 1993; Eke et al. 2004; Gerke et al. 2005; Yang et al. 2005; Berlind et al. 2006; Brough et al. 2006; Knobel et al. 2009).”
Are Brightest Halo Galaxies Central Galaxies (2010, methodology): “…have number density distributions that are well fit by a NFW profile (e.g., Lin et al. 2004), the corresponding concentration parameters seem to be significantly smaller than the values expected for their dark matter haloes, by about a factor of 2 to 3 (e.g., Hansen et al. 2005; Yang et al. 2005b).”
Galaxy Groups in the SDSS DR4. II. Halo Occupation Statistics (2007, methodology): “This quantity is crucial in modeling the two-point correlation function of galaxies on small scales (e.g., Benson et al. 2000; Berlind et al. 2003; Y05c; Tinker et al. 2007) and holds important information regarding the physical processes related to galaxy formation.”
Ongoing assembly of massive galaxies by major merging in large groups and clusters from the SDSS (2007, methodology): “In this paper we make use of the statistically large SDSS group catalog (Yang et al. 2005; Weinmann et al. 2006) to show that major mergers occur in present-day dense environments, and to explore the halo-mass dependence and central/satellite identity of merger-driven massive galaxy assembly.”
Cold gas stripping in satellite galaxies: from pairs to clusters (2016, methodology): “The authors apply the halo-based, FoF group finder algorithm developed by Yang et al. (2005) to SDSS DR7.”