The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Project – II. Stellar mass completeness of spectroscopic galaxy samples from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
Abstract
The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has collected spectra for over one million galaxies at 0.15 < z < 0.7 over a volume of 15.3 Gpc3 (9376 deg2) – providing us an opportunity to study the most massive galaxy populations with vanishing sample variance. However, BOSS samples are selected via complex colour cuts that are optimized for cosmology studies, not galaxy science. In this paper, we supplement BOSS samples with photometric redshifts from the Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Catalog and measure the total galaxy stellar mass function (SMF) at z ∼ 0.3 and z ∼ 0.55. With the total SMF in hand, we characterize the stellar mass completeness of BOSS samples. The high-redshift CMASS (constant mass) sample is significantly impacted by mass incompleteness and is 80 per cent complete at log 10(M*/M⊙) > 11.6 only in the narrow redshift range z = [0.51, 0.61]. The low-redshift LOWZ sample is 80 per cent complete at log 10(M*/M⊙) > 11.6 for z = [0.15, 0.43]. To construct mass complete samples at lower masses, spectroscopic samples need to be significantly supplemented by photometric redshifts. This work will enable future studies to better utilize the BOSS samples for galaxy-formation science.
Citation
Leauthaud , A , Bundy , K , Saito , S , Tinker , J , Maraston , C , Tojeiro , R , Huang , S , Brownstein , J R , Schneider , D P & Thomas , D 2016 , ' The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Project – II. Stellar mass completeness of spectroscopic galaxy samples from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey ' , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , vol. 457 , no. 4 , pp. 4021-4037 . https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw117
Publication
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0035-8711Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw117
Description
This work was supported by World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI Initiative), MEXT, Japan. RT acknowledges support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council via an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship (grant number ST/K004719/1). Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Energy Office of Science.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.
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