Measuring galaxy environment with the synergy of future photometric and spectroscopic surveys

Abstract

We exploit the synergy between low-resolution spectroscopy and photometric redshifts to study environmental effects on galaxy evolution in slitless spectroscopic surveys from space. As a test case, we consider the future Euclid Deep survey (~40deg${}^2$), which combines a slitless spectroscopic survey limited at H$\alpha$ flux $\ge 5\times 10^{-17}$ erg cm${}^{-2}$ s${}^{-1}$ and a photometric survey limited in H-band ($H\le 26$). We use Euclid-like galaxy mock catalogues, in which we anchor the photometric redshifts to the 3D galaxy distribution of the available spectroscopic redshifts. We then estimate the local density contrast by counting objects in cylindrical cells with radius from 1 to 10 h${}^{-1}$Mpc over the redshift range 0.9<z<1.8. We compare this density field with the one computed in a mock catalogue with the same depth as the Euclid Deep survey (H=26) but without redshift measurement errors. We find that our method successfully separates high from low density environments (the last from the first quintile of the density distribution), with higher efficiency at low redshift and large cell: the fraction of low density regions mistaken by high density peaks is <1% for all scales and redshifts explored, but for scales of 1 h${}^{-1}$Mpc for which is a few percent. These results show that we can efficiently study environment in photometric samples if spectroscopic information is available for a smaller sample of objects that sparsely samples the same volume. We demonstrate that these studies are possible in the Euclid Deep survey, i.e. in a redshift range in which environmental effects are different from those observed in the local universe, hence providing new constraints for galaxy evolution models.

18 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (21)

• Cosmic Star Formation History
• Mass and environment as drivers of galaxy evolution in SDSS and zCOSMOS and the origin of the Schechter function
• zCOSMOS: A Large VLT/VIMOS redshift survey covering 0 < z < 3 in the COSMOS field
• The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: Color and Luminosity Dependence of Galaxy Clustering at z~1
• HiZELS: a high redshift survey of H-alpha emitters. I: the cosmic star-formation rate and clustering at z=2.23
• The First Appearance of the Red Sequence of Galaxies in Proto-Clusters at 2<~z<~3
• The VIMOS VLT Deep Survey: The build-up of the colour-density relation
• Large Structures and Galaxy Evolution in COSMOS at z < 1.1
• Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Final Report
• A Comparative Study of Density Field Estimation for Galaxies: New Insights into the Evolution of Galaxies with Environment in COSMOS out to z~3
• The H-alpha Luminosity Function and Star Formation Rate Volume Density at z=0.8 from the NEWFIRM H-alpha Survey
• Modelling the number density of Halpha emitters for future spectroscopic near-IR space missions
• Halo and Galaxy Formation Histories from the Millennium Simulation: Public release of a VO-oriented and SQL-queryable database for studying the evolution of galaxies in the LambdaCDM cosmogony
• The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS): a large-scale structure at z=0.73 and the relation of galaxy morphologies to local environment
• Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): The dependence of the galaxy luminosity function on environment, redshift and colour
• The VIMOS-VLT Deep Survey. The dependence of clustering on galaxy stellar mass at z~1
• The SPLASH survey: Quiescent galaxies are more strongly clustered but are not necessarily located in high-density environments
• The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey - Searching for Cosmic Voids
• The definition of environment and its relation to the quenching of galaxies at z=1-2 in a hierarchical Universe
• J and H-band Imaging of AKARI North Ecliptic Pole Survey Field
• The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). Hierarchical scaling and biasing

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Euclid. I. Overview of the Euclid mission
• Persistence of the Color-Density Relation and Efficient Environmental Quenching to $z\sim 1.4$
• The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). The decline of cosmic star formation: quenching, mass, and environment connections
• Reconstructing the galaxy density field with photometric redshifts: II. Environment-dependent galaxy evolution since $z\simeq 3$
• A cross-correlation-based estimate of the galaxy luminosity function
• The galaxy environment in GAMA G3C groups using the Kilo Degree Survey Data Release 3