English

Photometric Objects Around Cosmic Webs (PAC). VI. High Satellite Fraction of Quasars

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-05-16 v3

Abstract

The Photometric objects Around Cosmic webs (PAC) approach developed in Xu et al. (2022b) has the advantage of making full use of spectroscopic and deeper photometric surveys. With the merits of PAC, the excess surface density nˉ2wp\bar{n}_2w_{{\rm{p}}} of neighboring galaxies can be measured down to stellar mass 1010.80M10^{10.80}\,M_{\odot} around quasars at redshift 0.8<zs<1.00.8<z_{\rm{s}}<1.0, with the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV (SDSS-IV) extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys. We find that nˉ2wp\bar{n}_2w_{{\rm{p}}} generally increases quite steeply with the decrease of the separation. Using subhalo abundance matching method, we can accurately model the nˉ2wp\bar{n}_2w_{{\rm{p}}} both on small and large scales. We show that the steep increase of the nˉ2wp\bar{n}_2w_{{\rm{p}}} towards the quasars requires that a large fraction fsate=0.290.06+0.05f_{\mathrm{sate}}=0.29_{-0.06}^{+0.05} of quasars should be satellites in massive halos, and find that this fraction measurement is insensitive to the assumptions of our modeling. This high satellite fraction indicates that the subhalos have nearly the same probability to host quasars as the halos for the same (infall) halo mass, and the large scale environment has negligible effect on the quasar activity. We show that even with this high satellite fraction, each massive halo on average does not host more than one satellite quasar due to the sparsity of quasars.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.00565,
  title  = {Photometric Objects Around Cosmic Webs (PAC). VI. High Satellite Fraction of Quasars},
  author = {Shanquan Gui and Kun Xu and Y. P. Jing and Donghai Zhao and Hongyu Gao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.00565},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

15 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal