English

Evolution of Galaxy Luminosity Function and Luminosity Function by Density Environment at 0.03<z<0.5

Astrophysics 2011-02-11 v1

Abstract

Using galaxy sample observed by the BATC large-field multi-color sky survey and galaxy data of SDSS in the overlapped fields, we study the dependence of the restframe rr-band galaxy luminosity function on redshift and on large-scale environment. The large-scale environment is defined by isodensity contour with density contrast \delta\rho/\rho. The data set is a composite sample of 69,671 galaxies with redshifts 0.03 < z < 0.5 and r < 21.5 mag. The redshifts are composed by three parts: 1) spectroscopic redshifts in SDSS for local and most luminous galaxies; 2) 20-color photometric redshifts derived from BATC and SDSS; 3) 5-color photometric redshifts in SDSS. We find that the faint-end slope \alpha steepens slightly from -1.21 at z ~ 0.06 to -1.35 at z ~ 0.4, which is the natural consequence of the hierarchical formation of galaxies. The luminosity function also differs with different environments. The value of \alpha changes from -1.21 at underdense regions to -1.37 at overdense regions and the corresponding M* brightens from -22.26 to -22.64. This suggests that the fraction of faint galaxies is larger in high density regions than in low density regions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0607407,
  title  = {Evolution of Galaxy Luminosity Function and Luminosity Function by Density Environment at 0.03<z<0.5},
  author = {Lifang Xia and Xu Zhou and Yanbin Yang and Jun Ma and Zhaoji Jiang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0607407},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

7 pages, 9 figures, accepted by ApJ

R2 v1 2026-07-22T09:10:21.662Z