K-Band Properties of Galaxy Clusters and Groups: Luminosity Function, Radial Distribution, and Halo Occupation Number

By Yen-Ting Lin, Joseph J. Mohr, S. Stanford. 2004

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We explore the near-infrared (NIR) K-band properties of galaxies within 93 galaxy clusters and groups using data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey. We use X-ray properties of these clusters to pinpoint cluster centers and estimate cluster masses. By stacking all these systems, we study the shape of the cluster luminosity function and the galaxy distribution within the clusters. We find that the galaxy profile is well described by the Navarro, Frenk, & White (NFW) profile with a concentration parameter c ~ 3, with no evidence for cluster mass dependence of the concentration. Using this sample, whose masses span the range from 3 × 1013 to 2 × 1015 M☉, we confirm the existence of a tight correlation between total galaxy NIR luminosity and cluster binding mass, which indicates that NIR light can serve as a cluster mass indicator. From the observed galaxy profile, together with cluster mass profile measurements from the literature, we find that the mass-to-light ratio is a weakly decreasing function of cluster radius and that it increases with cluster mass. We also derive the mean number of galaxies within halos of a given mass, the halo occupation number. We find that the mean number scales as N ∝ M0.84±0.04 for galaxies brighter than MK = -21, indicating that high-mass clusters have fewer galaxies per unit mass than low-mass clusters. Using published observations at high redshift, we show that higher redshift clusters have higher mean occupation numbers than nearby systems of the same mass. By comparing the luminosity function and radial distribution of galaxies in low-mass and high-mass clusters, we show that there is a marked decrease in the number density of galaxies fainter than M* as one moves to higher mass clusters; in addition, extremely luminous galaxies are more probable in high-mass clusters. We explore several processes, including tidal interactions and merging, as a way of explaining the variation in galaxy population with cluster mass.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biophysics, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/decc0bec812634143c2ff7837c24716a87bb6820

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Citations in the corpus

Toward a Halo Mass Function for Precision Cosmology: The Limits of Universality (2008, background): “Optical cluster searches will often locate the cluster center at the location of the brightest member, which is also expected to be located near the peak of X-ray emission (Lin et al. 2004; Koester et al. 2007; Rykoff et al. 2008).”
On the Mass-to-Light Ratio of Large-Scale Structure (2004, methodology): “A number of authors have reported a trend of increasing M/L with cluster mass (e.g., Bahcall & Comerford 2002; Lin et al. 2004; Popesso et al. 2004), a result seemingly in conflict with the claimed plateau of M/L at high mass and with our results here.”
MEASURING THE ULTIMATE HALO MASS OF GALAXY CLUSTERS: REDSHIFTS AND MASS PROFILES FROM THE HECTOSPEC CLUSTER SURVEY (HeCS) (2012, background): “Establishing these relations for local clusters is critical for future studies of clusters in the distant universe with the goal of constraining dark energy (Majumdar & Mohr 2004; Lin et al. 2004).”
LoCuSS: THE SLOW QUENCHING OF STAR FORMATION IN CLUSTER GALAXIES AND THE NEED FOR PRE-PROCESSING (2015, methodology): “…described by a projected NFW profile with a concentration parameter cg = 3.01 ± 0.16 (red curve), consistent with the cg = 2.90 ± 0.22 value obtained by Lin et al. (2004) or cg = 2.7 ± 0.7 obtained by Budzynski et al. (2012), while Muzzin et al. (2007) obtained a higher concentration of cg = 4.13…”
Virial Scaling of Massive Dark Matter Halos: Why Clusters Prefer a High Normalization Cosmology (2007, background): “…(Markevitch 1998; Arnaud & Evrard 1999), isophotal size (Mohr & Evrard 1997), intracluster gas mass (Mohr et al. 1999), thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich decrement (Nagai 2006), and galactic content measured at near-infrared (Lin et al. 2004; Lin & Mohr 2004) or red bandpasses (Popesso et al. 2004).”
Are Brightest Halo Galaxies Central Galaxies (2010, background): “…there is evidence to support our assumption that satellite galaxies 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,…”
A MaxBCG Catalog of 13,823 Galaxy Clusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2007, background): “Optical and X–ray methods may identify different cluster centers, and while optical richness and X–ray luminosity are clearly coupled (Lin et al. 2004; Popesso et al. 2005), there is significant scatter in this relation.”
Towards a realistic population of simulated galaxy groups and clusters (2013, methodology): “…galaxies (i.e. no ICL) as a function of halo mass at z = 0 for the various simulations and compare to observations of individual X-ray-selected systems of Lin & Mohr (2004) and Lin, Mohr & Stanford (2004) (hereafter collectively referred to as Lin et al. 2004) and Rasmussen & Ponman (2009).”
Stellar Mass—Halo Mass Relation and Star Formation Efficiency in High-Mass Halos (2014, result): “Our results are closer to those of Lin et al. (2004), who found that the total K-band luminosity–M500 relation has slope of 0.69 ± 0.04 and scatter of ≈ 32%.”