Understanding the nature of luminous red galaxies (LRGs): Connecting LRGs to central and satellite subhalos

Abstract

We develop a novel abundance matching method to construct a mock catalog of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) in SDSS, using catalogs of halos and subhalos in N-body simulations for a LCDM model. Motivated by observations suggesting that LRGs are passively-evolving, massive early-type galaxies with a typical age >5Gyr, we assume that simulated halos at z=2 (z2-halo) are progenitors for LRG-host subhalos observed today, and we label the most tightly bound particles in each progenitor z2-halo as LRG ``stars''. We then identify the subhalos containing these stars to z=0.3 (SDSS redshift) in descending order of the masses of z2-halos until the comoving number density of the matched subhalos becomes comparable to the measured number density of SDSS LRGs, n=10^{-4} (h/Mpc)^3. Once the above prescription is determined, our only free parameter is the number density of halos identified at z=2 and this parameter is fixed to match the observed number density at z = 0.3. By tracing subsequent merging and assembly histories of each progenitor z2-halo, we can directly compute, from the mock catalog, the distributions of central and satellite LRGs and their internal motions in each host halo at z=0.3. While the SDSS LRGs are galaxies selected by the magnitude and color cuts from the SDSS images and are not necessarily a stellar-mass-selected sample, our mock catalog reproduces a host of SDSS measurements: the halo occupation distribution for central and satellite LRGs, the projected auto-correlation function of LRGs, the cross-correlation of LRGs with shapes of background galaxies (LRG-galaxy weak lensing), and the nonlinear redshift-space distortion effect, the Finger-of-God effect, in the angle-averaged redshift-space power spectrum.

17 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Added Appendix in response to the referee's suggestions

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• Power spectrum of halo intrinsic alignments in simulations
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• Evolution of the luminosity-to-halo mass relation of LRGs from a combined SDSS-DR10+RCS2 analysis
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• Reconstruction of halo power spectrum from redshift-space galaxy distribution: cylinder-grouping method and halo exclusion effect
• Simulating the Anisotropic Clustering of Luminous Red Galaxies with Subhalos: A Direct Confrontation with Observation and Cosmological Implications
• ISW-Galaxy Cross Correlation:A probe of Dark Energy clustering and distribution of Dark Matter tracers
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• Subhalo abundance matching using progenitor mass at varying redshift: Two modes of stellar mass growth imprinted into the Subaru HSC galaxy clustering
• Galaxy assembly bias and large-scale distribution: a comparison between IllustrisTNG and a semi-analytic model
• Testing local position invariance with odd multipoles of galaxy clustering statistics