5 years ago

The mass-size relation of LRGs from BOSS and DECaLS.

Antonio D. Montero-Dorta, Francisco Prada, Ginevra Favole, Sergio A. Rodríguez-Torres, David J. Schlegel

We use the DECaLS DR3 survey photometry matched to the SDSS-III/BOSS DR12 spectroscopic catalog to investigate the morphology and stellar mass-size relation of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) within the CMASS and LOWZ galaxy samples in the redshift range $0.2<z<0.7$. The large majority of both samples is composed of early-type galaxies with De Vaucouleurs profiles, while only less than 20% are late-type exponentials. We calibrate DECaLS effective radii using the higher resolution CFHT/MegaCam observations and optimise the correction for each morphological type. By cross-matching the photometric properties of the early-type population with the Portsmouth stellar mass catalog, we are able to explore the high-mass end of the distribution using a large sample of 313,026 galaxies over 4380 deg$^{2}$. We find a clear correlation between the sizes and the stellar masses of these galaxies, which appears flatter than previous estimates at lower masses. The sizes of these early-type galaxies do not exhibit significant evolution within the BOSS redshift range, but a slightly declining redshift trend is found when these results are combined with $z\sim0.1$ SDSS measurements at the high-mass end. The synergy between BOSS and DECaLS has important applications in other fields, including galaxy clustering and weak lensing.

Publisher URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01596

DOI: arXiv:1802.01596v1

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.