TY - JOUR
T1 - The correlation between halo mass and stellar mass for the most massive galaxies in the universe
AU - Tinker, Jeremy L.
AU - Brownstein, Joel R.
AU - Guo, Hong
AU - Leauthaud, Alexie
AU - Maraston, Claudia
AU - Masters, Karen
AU - Montero-Dorta, Antonio D.
AU - Thomas, Daniel
AU - Tojeiro, Rita
AU - Weiner, Benjamin
AU - Zehavi, Idit
AU - Olmstead, Matthew D.
PY - 2017/4/24
Y1 - 2017/4/24
N2 - We present measurements of the clustering of galaxies as a function of their stellar mass in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We compare the clustering of samples using 12 different methods for estimating stellar mass, isolating the method that has the smallest scatter at fixed halo mass. In this test, the stellar mass estimate with the smallest errors yields the highest amplitude of clustering at fixed number density. We find that the PCA stellar masses of Chen etal (2012) clearly have the tightest correlation with halo mass. The PCA masses use the full galaxy spectrum, differentiating them from other estimates that only use optical photometric information. Using the PCA masses, we measure the large-scale bias as a function of Mgal for galaxies with logMgal>=11.4, correcting for incompleteness at the low-mass end of our measurements. Using the abundance-matching ansatz to connect dark matter halo mass to stellar mass, we construct theoretical models of b(Mgal) that match the same stellar mass function but have different amounts of scatter in stellar mass at fixed halo mass, sigma_logM. Using this approach, we find sigma_logM=0.18^{+0.01}_{-0.02}. This value includes both intrinsic scatter as well as random errors in the stellar masses. To partially remove the latter, we use repeated spectra to estimate statistical errors on the stellar masses, yielding an upper limit to the intrinsic scatter of 0.16 dex.
AB - We present measurements of the clustering of galaxies as a function of their stellar mass in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We compare the clustering of samples using 12 different methods for estimating stellar mass, isolating the method that has the smallest scatter at fixed halo mass. In this test, the stellar mass estimate with the smallest errors yields the highest amplitude of clustering at fixed number density. We find that the PCA stellar masses of Chen etal (2012) clearly have the tightest correlation with halo mass. The PCA masses use the full galaxy spectrum, differentiating them from other estimates that only use optical photometric information. Using the PCA masses, we measure the large-scale bias as a function of Mgal for galaxies with logMgal>=11.4, correcting for incompleteness at the low-mass end of our measurements. Using the abundance-matching ansatz to connect dark matter halo mass to stellar mass, we construct theoretical models of b(Mgal) that match the same stellar mass function but have different amounts of scatter in stellar mass at fixed halo mass, sigma_logM. Using this approach, we find sigma_logM=0.18^{+0.01}_{-0.02}. This value includes both intrinsic scatter as well as random errors in the stellar masses. To partially remove the latter, we use repeated spectra to estimate statistical errors on the stellar masses, yielding an upper limit to the intrinsic scatter of 0.16 dex.
KW - astro-ph.GA
KW - astro-ph.CO
UR - https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/10951
U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/aa6845
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/aa6845
M3 - Article
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 839
JO - The Astrophysical Journal
JF - The Astrophysical Journal
IS - 2
M1 - 121
ER -