English

A cross-correlation-based estimate of the galaxy luminosity function

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2018-03-07 v2

Abstract

We extend existing methods for using cross-correlations to derive redshift distributions for photometric galaxies, without using photometric redshifts. The model presented in this paper simultaneously yields highly accurate and unbiased redshift distributions and, for the first time, redshift-dependent luminosity functions, using only clustering information and the apparent magnitudes of the galaxies as input. In contrast to many existing techniques for recovering unbiased redshift distributions, the output of our method is not degenerate with the galaxy bias b(z), which is achieved by modelling the shape of the luminosity bias. We successfully apply our method to a mock galaxy survey and discuss improvements to be made before applying our model to real data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.05326,
  title  = {A cross-correlation-based estimate of the galaxy luminosity function},
  author = {Marcel P. van Daalen and Martin White},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.05326},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

14 pages, 7 figures. Replaced to match the version accepted by MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:46:52.563Z