2009/10/31 by Cheng Li, Simon D. M. White · 9 citations
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Autocorrelation #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Impact of Light on Environment and Health #Luminosity #Photometric redshift #Photometry (optics) #Physics #Redshift #Remote Sensing in Agriculture #Sky #Star formation #Stars #Statistics #Stellar mass #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.16924.x
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 407(1), 515-519 (Oxford University Press) · 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted to MNRAS; three new paragraphs added: two at the end of Sec. 2 concerning cross-correlations between different bands and possible biases due to photometry errors, and one at the end of the paper discussing marked correlation functions
arxiv created 2010/04/26 · openalex publication_date 2010/06/02 · arxiv updated 2015/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The final data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) provides reliable photometry and spectroscopy for about half a million galaxies with median redshift 0.09. Here, we use these data to estimate projected autocorrelation functions wp(rp) for the light of galaxies in the five SDSS photometric bands. Comparison with the analogous stellar mass autocorrelation, estimated in a previous paper, shows that stellar luminosity is less strongly clustered than stellar mass in all bands and on all scales. Over the full non-linear range 10 h−1 kpc < rp < 10 h−1 Mpc our autocorrelation estimates are extremely well represented by power laws. The parameters of the corresponding spatial functions ξ(r) = (r/r0)γ vary systematically from r0= 4.5 h−1 Mpc and γ=−1.74 for the bluest band (the u band) to r0= 5.8 h−1 Mpc and γ=−1.83 for the reddest one (the z band). These may be compared with r0= 6.1 h−1 Mpc and γ=−1.84 for the stellar mass. Ratios of wp(rp) between two given wavebands are proportional to the mean colour of correlated stars at projected distance rp from a randomly chosen star. The ratio of the stellar mass to luminosity autocorrelations measures an analogous mean stellar mass-to-light ratio (). All colours get redder and all mass-to-light ratios get larger with decreasing rp, with the amplitude of the effects decreasing strongly to redder passbands. Even for the u band the effects are quite modest, with maximum shifts of about 0.1 in u−g and about 25 per cent in . These trends provide a precise characterization of the well-known dependence of stellar populations on environment.