IMPROVED MOCK GALAXY CATALOGS FOR THE DEEP2 GALAXY REDSHIFT SURVEY FROM SUBHALO ABUNDANCE AND ENVIRONMENT MATCHING

Journal Article · Sun Sep 15 00:00:00 EDT 2013 · Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0067-0049/208/1/1· OSTI ID:22136520

Gerke, Brian F.; Wechsler, Risa H.; Behroozi, Peter S. ^[1]; Cooper, Michael C. ^[2]; Yan, Renbin ^[3]

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1. Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, M/S 29, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (United States)
2. Center for Galaxy Evolution, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697 (United States)
3. Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, Department of Physics, New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003 (United States)

We develop empirical methods for modeling the galaxy population and populating cosmological N-body simulations with mock galaxies according to the observed properties of galaxies in survey data. We use these techniques to produce a new set of mock catalogs for the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey based on the output of the high-resolution Bolshoi simulation, as well as two other simulations with different cosmological parameters, all of which we release for public use. The mock-catalog creation technique uses subhalo abundance matching to assign galaxy luminosities to simulated dark-matter halos. It then adds color information to the resulting mock galaxies in a manner that depends on the local galaxy density, in order to reproduce the measured color-environment relation in the data. In the course of constructing the catalogs, we test various models for including scatter in the relation between halo mass and galaxy luminosity, within the abundance-matching framework. We find that there is no constant-scatter model that can simultaneously reproduce both the luminosity function and the autocorrelation function of DEEP2. This result has implications for galaxy-formation theory, and it restricts the range of contexts in which the mock catalogs can be usefully applied. Nevertheless, careful comparisons show that our new mock catalogs accurately reproduce a wide range of the other properties of the DEEP2 catalog, suggesting that they can be used to gain a detailed understanding of various selection effects in DEEP2.

• OSTI ID: 22136520
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, Vol. 208, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0067-0049
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
ABUNDANCE
CATALOGS
DENSITY
LUMINOSITY
MASS
MILKY WAY
NONLUMINOUS MATTER
RED SHIFT
RESOLUTION
SIMULATION