THE STELLAR MASS GROWTH OF BRIGHTEST CLUSTER GALAXIES IN THE IRAC SHALLOW CLUSTER SURVEY

Journal Article · Mon Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/771/1/61· OSTI ID:22140188

Lin, Yen-Ting ^[1]; Brodwin, Mark ^[2]; Gonzalez, Anthony H. ^[3]; Bode, Paul ^[4]; Eisenhardt, Peter R. M. ^[5]; Stanford, S. A. ^[6]; Vikhlinin, Alexey ^[7]

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1. Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan (China)
2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Missouri, 5110 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, MO 64110 (United States)
3. Department of Astronomy, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 (United States)
4. Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (United States)
5. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109 (United States)
6. Physics Department, University of California, Davis, CA 95616 (United States)
7. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138 (United States)

The details of the stellar mass assembly of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) remain an unresolved problem in galaxy formation. We have developed a novel approach that allows us to construct a sample of clusters that form an evolutionary sequence, and have applied it to the Spitzer IRAC Shallow Cluster Survey (ISCS) to examine the evolution of BCGs in progenitors of present-day clusters with mass of (2.5-4.5) Multiplication-Sign 10{sup 14} M{sub Sun }. We follow the cluster mass growth history extracted from a high resolution cosmological simulation, and then use an empirical method that infers the cluster mass based on the ranking of cluster luminosity to select high-z clusters of appropriate mass from ISCS to be progenitors of the given set of z = 0 clusters. We find that, between z = 1.5 and 0.5, the BCGs have grown in stellar mass by a factor of 2.3, which is well-matched by the predictions from a state-of-the-art semi-analytic model. Below z = 0.5 we see hints of differences in behavior between the model and observation.

• OSTI ID: 22140188
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 771, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
EVOLUTION
FORECASTING
GALAXIES
GALAXY CLUSTERS
LUMINOSITY
MASS
RESOLUTION
SIMULATION