Reaching for the Edge I: Probing the Outskirts of Massive Galaxies with HSC, DECaLS, SDSS, and Dragonfly

Abstract

The outer light (stellar halos) of massive galaxies has recently emerged as a possible low scatter tracer of dark matter halo mass. To test the robustness of outer light measurements across different data sets, we compare the surface brightness profiles of massive galaxies using four independent data sets: the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey (HSC), the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and the Dragonfly Wide Field Survey (Dragonfly). We use customized pipelines for HSC and DECaLS to achieve better sky background subtraction. For galaxies at $z<0.05$, Dragonfly has the best control of systematics, reaching surface brightness levels of ${\mu }_r\sim 30$ mag/arcsec${}^2$. At $0.19<z<0.50$, HSC can reliably recover surface brightness profiles to ${\mu }_r\sim 28.5$ mag/arcsec${}^2$ reaching $R=100-150$ kpc. DECaLS surface brightness profiles show good agreement with HSC but are noisier at large radii. The median profiles of galaxy ensembles in both HSC and DECaLS reach $R>200$ kpc without significant bias. At $0.19<z<0.50$, DECaLS and HSC measurements of the stellar mass contained within 100 kpc agree within 0.05 dex. Finally, we use weak gravitational lensing to show that measurements of outer light with DECaLS at $0.19<z<0.50$ show a similar promise as HSC as a low scatter proxy of halo mass. The tests and results from this paper represent an important step forward for accurate measurements of the outer light of massive galaxies and demonstrate that outer light measurements from DECam imaging will be a promising method for finding galaxy clusters for DES and DESI.

arXiv comment19 pages, 10 figures. Submitted to MNRAS. Main results are shown in Fig 5-10

References in corpus (96)

• Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
• The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation
• Galactic Stellar and Substellar Initial Mass Function
• The Seventh Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Introducing the Illustris Project: Simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe
• The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III
• Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
• First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: matter and galaxy clustering
• First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the stellar mass content of groups and clusters of galaxies
• The Sixteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release from the APOGEE-2 Southern Survey and Full Release of eBOSS Spectra
• Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation
• Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): survey diagnostics and core data release
• The Hyper Suprime-Cam SSP Survey: Overview and Survey Design
• Structure and Formation of Elliptical and Spheroidal Galaxies
• The Two Phases of Galaxy Formation
• redMaPPer I: Algorithm and SDSS DR8 Catalog
• Confirmation of the remarkable compactness of massive quiescent galaxies at z~2.3: early-type galaxies did not form in a simple monolithic collapse
• Galaxy And Mass Assembly: Stellar Mass Estimates
• The Average Mass-to-Light Profile of Galaxy Clusters
• Improved background subtraction for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey images
• PRIMUS: Constraints on Star Formation Quenching and Galaxy Merging, and the Evolution of the Stellar Mass Function From z=0-1
• The Hyper Suprime-Cam Software Pipeline
• K-band Properties of Galaxy Clusters and Groups: Brightest Cluster Galaxies and Intracluster Light
• The stellar mass assembly of galaxies in the Illustris simulation: growth by mergers and the spatial distribution of accreted stars
• Preparing Red-Green-Blue (RGB) Images from CCD Data
• Diffuse Light in the Virgo Cluster
• The Atlas3D project -- XXIX. The new look of early-type galaxies and surrounding fields disclosed by extremely deep optical images
• The structure of galactic disks: Studying late-type spiral galaxies using SDSS
• Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Structural Investigation of Galaxies via Model Analysis (SIGMA)
• Intracluster Light in Nearby Galaxy Clusters: Relationship to the Halos of Brightest Cluster Galaxies
• The massive end of the luminosity and stellar mass functions: Dependence on the fit to the light profile
• The Frequency of Tidal Features Associated with Nearby Luminous Elliptical Galaxies from a Statistically Complete Sample
• The Importance of Mergers for the Origin of Intracluster Stars in Cosmological Simulations of Galaxy Clusters
• The first-year shear catalog of the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam SSP Survey
• Ultra Low Surface Brightness Imaging with the Dragonfly Telephoto Array
• The luminosities, sizes and velocity dispersions of Brightest Cluster Galaxies: Implications for formation history
• Lensing is Low: Cosmology, Galaxy Formation, or New Physics?
• Galactic accretion and the outer structure of galaxies in the CDM model
• The SDSS Coadd: 275 deg^2 of Deep SDSS Imaging on Stripe 82
• The Burrell Schmidt Deep Virgo Survey: Tidal Debris, Galaxy Halos, and Diffuse Intracluster Light in the Virgo Cluster
• The Fornax Deep Survey with VST. I. The extended and diffuse stellar halo of NGC~1399 out to 192 kpc
• A cluster finding algorithm based on the multiband identification of red sequence galaxies
• Beyond 31 mag/arcsec^2: the low surface brightness frontier with the largest optical telescopes
• The Formation and Evolution of Intracluster Light
• Diffuse Optical Light in Galaxy Clusters II: Correlations with Cluster Properties
• Weak lensing shear calibration with simulations of the HSC survey
• Brightest Cluster Galaxies at the Present Epoch
• The IAC Stripe 82 Legacy Project: a wide-area survey for faint surface brightness astronomy
• The Dragonfly Nearby Galaxies Survey. I. Substantial variation in the diffuse stellar halos around spiral galaxies
• The Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey. III. The Three-Component Structure of Nearby Elliptical Galaxies
• The bright-star masks for the HSC-SSP survey
• Intracluster light: a luminous tracer for dark matter in clusters of galaxies
• Optical and Near-Infrared Color Profiles in Nearby Early-Type Galaxies and The Implied Age and Metallicity Gradients
• The Quantity of Intracluster Light: Comparing Theoretical and Observational Measurement Techniques Using Simulated Clusters
• Parametrizing the Stellar Haloes of Galaxies
• First results from the Dragonfly Telephoto Array: the apparent lack of a stellar halo in the massive spiral galaxy M101
• The Dragonfly Nearby Galaxies Survey. II. Ultra diffuse galaxies near the elliptical galaxy NGC 5485
• Co-evolution of BCGs and ICL using CLASH
• Characterizing Diffused Stellar Light in simulated galaxy clusters
• Individual Stellar Halos of Massive Galaxies Measured to 100 kpc at $0.3<z<0.5$ using Hyper Suprime-Cam
• The Stellar Initial Mass Function in Early-Type Galaxies From Absorption Line Spectroscopy. I. Data and Empirical Trends
• SPIDER VII - Revealing the Stellar Population Content of Massive Early-type Galaxies out to 8Re
• The influence of diffuse scattered light I. The PSF and its role to observations of the edge-on galaxy NGC 5907
• Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: Detection of Intra-cluster Light at Redshift $\sim$ 0.25
• The LSST Data Management System
• The Dragonfly Nearby Galaxies Survey. V. HST/ACS Observations of 23 Low Surface Brightness Objects in the Fields of NGC1052, NGC1084, M96, and NGC4258
• The Fornax Deep Survey with VST. II. Fornax A: a two-phase assembly caught on act
• Structure of Brightest Cluster Galaxies and Intracluster Light
• The faint stellar halos of massive red galaxies from stacks of more than 42000 SDSS LRG images
• Removing Internal Reflections from Deep Imaging Datasets
• The Fornax Deep Survey with VST. VIII. Connecting the accretion history with the cluster density
• The Fornax Deep Survey with VST. V. Exploring the faintest regions of the bright early-type galaxies inside the virial radius
• Tidal Features at 0.05<z<0.45 in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program: Properties and Formation Channels
• Introducing the LBT Imaging of Galactic Halos and Tidal Structures (LIGHTS) survey. A preview of the low surface brightness Universe to be unveiled by LSST
• Weak Lensing Reveals a Tight Connection Between Dark Matter Halo Mass and the Distribution of Stellar Mass in Massive Galaxies
• The Dragonfly Wide Field Survey. I. Telescope, Survey Design and Data Characterization
• The Halos and Environments of Nearby Galaxies (HERON) I: Imaging, Sample Characteristics, and Envelope Diameters
• The cosmic assembly of stellar haloes in massive Early-Type Galaxies
• The MASSIVE Survey - XII Connecting Stellar Populations of Early-Type Galaxies to Kinematics and Environment
• VEGAS: A VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey.VI. The diffuse light in HCG 86 from the ultra-deep VEGAS images
• Dragonfly imaging of the galaxy NGC5907: a revised view of the iconic stellar stream
• The stellar halo of isolated central galaxies in the Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging survey
• Comparing PyMorph and SDSS photometry. II. The differences are more than semantics and are not dominated by intracluster light
• Comparing PyMorph and SDSS photometry. I. Background sky and model fitting effects
• Galaxy-Galaxy Lensing in HSC: Validation Tests and the Impact of Heterogeneous Spectroscopic Training Sets
• Testing the presence of multiple photometric components in nearby early-type galaxies using SDSS
• The dragonfly nearby galaxies survey. Iv. A giant stellar disk in ngc 2841
• Stellar and Weak Lensing Profiles of Massive Galaxies in the Hyper-Suprime Cam Survey and in Hydrodynamic Simulations
• Brightest Cluster Galaxies and Intra-Cluster Light: Their Mass Distribution in the Innermost Regions of Groups and Clusters
• The MASSIVE Survey XIII -- Spatially Resolved Stellar Kinematics in the Central 1 kpc of 20 Massive Elliptical Galaxies with the GMOS-North Integral-Field Spectrograph
• Intragroup and Intracluster Light
• Retrieving Cirrus Microphysical Properties from Stellar Aureoles
• The Dragonfly Wide Field Survey. II. Accurate Total Luminosities and Colors of Nearby Massive Galaxies and Implications for the Galaxy Stellar Mass Function
• The Australian Space Eye: studying the history of galaxy formation with a CubeSat

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): Extended Intra-Group Light in a group at $z=0.2$ from deep Hyper-Suprime Cam images
• Beyond Ultra-diffuse Galaxies. I. Mass--Size Outliers among the Satellites of Milky Way Analogs
• Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies as Extreme Star-forming Environments I: Mapping Star Formation in HI-Rich UDGs
• Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Comparing Visually and Spectroscopically Identified Galaxy Merger Samples
• SKYSURF-4: Panchromatic HST All-Sky Surface-Brightness Measurement Methods and Results
• A Recipe for Unbiased Background Modeling in Deep Wide-Field Astronomical Images
• Beyond Ultra-diffuse Galaxies. II. Environmental Quenching of Mass-Size Outliers among the Satellites of Milky Way Analogs
• Dust in Clusters of Galaxies
• Memoirs of mass accretion: probing the edges of intracluster light in simulated galaxy clusters
• IllustrisTNG in the HSC-SSP: No Shortage of Thin Disk Galaxies in TNG50
• Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Intra-Cluster Light from Redshift 0.2 to 0.5
• COUGS-DESI: A Catalog of Unusual Galaxies with Polar Structures in the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
• The Intracluster Light of Abell 3667: Unveiling an Optical Bridge in LSST Precursor Data
• The Outskirt Stellar Mass of Low-Redshift Massive Galaxies is an Excellent Halo Mass Proxy in Illustris/IllustrisTNG Simulations
• A MaNGA about the Legacy I: Connecting the Assembly of Stellar Halo with the Average Star Formation History in Low-Redshift Massive Galaxies