Luminous Red Galaxies: Selection and classification by combining optical and infrared photometry

Abstract

We describe a new method of combining optical and infrared photometry to select Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) at redshifts $z>0.6$. We explore this technique using a combination of optical photometry from CFHTLS and HST, infrared photometry from the WISE satellite, and spectroscopic or photometric redshifts from the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey or COSMOS. We present a variety of methods for testing the success of our selection, and present methods for optimization given a set of rest-frame color and redshift requirements. We have tested this selection in two different regions of the sky, the COSMOS and Extended Groth Strip (EGS) fields, to reduce the effect of cosmic/sample variance. We have used these methods to assemble large samples of LRGs for two different ancillary programs as a part of the SDSS-III/ BOSS spectroscopic survey. This technique is now being used to select $\sim$600,000 LRG targets for SDSS-IV/eBOSS, which began observations in Fall 2014, and will be adapted for the proposed DESI survey. We have found these methods can select high-redshift LRGs efficiently with minimal stellar contamination; this is extremely difficult to achieve with selections that rely on optical photometry alone.

10 pages, 13 figures, Published in the Astrophysical Journal

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV: Mapping the Milky Way, Nearby Galaxies, and the Distant Universe
• The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Overview and Early Data
• Target Selection and Validation of DESI Luminous Red Galaxies
• The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Quasar Target Selection
• The Clustering of DESI-like Luminous Red Galaxies Using Photometric Redshifts
• The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations at redshift of 0.72 with the DR14 Luminous Red Galaxy Sample
• The SDSS-IV extended Baryonic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Luminous Red Galaxy Target Selection
• HI constraints from the cross-correlation of eBOSS galaxies and Green Bank Telescope intensity maps
• Deep Full-sky Coadds from Three Years of WISE and NEOWISE Observations
• The 2-degree Field Lensing Survey: design and clustering measurements
• Preliminary Target Selection for the DESI Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG) Sample
• Multi-tracer extension of the halo model: probing quenching and conformity in eBOSS
• The evolution of the [OII], Hβ and [OIII] emission-line luminosity functions over the last nine billions years
• Automated novelty detection in the WISE survey with one-class support vector machines
• Radio properties of ten nearby ultraluminous infrared galaxies with signatures of luminous buried active galactic nuclei
• J-PLUS: Detecting and studying extragalactic globular clusters -- the case of NGC 1023
• Photometric Selection of a Massive Galaxy Catalog with $z\ge 0.55$
• The Redshifts from 122 Bands: Comparative Redshift Forecast for Low-Resolution Spectra from SPHEREx and 7-Dimensional Sky Survey (7DS)