The Angular Clustering of Galaxy Pairs

Abstract

We identify close pairs of galaxies from 278 deg^2 of Sloan Digital Sky Survey commissioning imaging data. The pairs are drawn from a sample of 330,041 galaxies with 18 < r^* < 20. We determine the angular correlation function of galaxy pairs, and find it to be stronger than the correlation function of single galaxies by a factor of 2.9 +/- 0.4. The two correlation functions have the same logarithmic slope of 0.77. We invert Limber's equation to estimate the three-dimensional correlation functions; we find clustering lengths of r_0= 4.2 +/- 0.4 h^{-1} Mpc for galaxies and 7.8 +/- 0.7 h^{-1} Mpc for galaxy pairs. These results agree well with the global richness dependence of the correlation functions of galaxy systems.

12 pages. ApJ, in press

References in corpus (4)

• The Luminosity Function of Galaxies in SDSS Commissioning Data
• The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: Luminosity dependence of galaxy clustering
• Galaxy Number Counts from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Commissioning Data
• The ROSAT-ESO Flux Limited X-Ray (REFLEX) Galaxy Cluster Survey I: The Construction of the Cluster Sample

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• Two-Dimensional Topology of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Three-Dimensional Genus Statistics of Galaxies in the SDSS Early Data Release
• Merging Galaxies in the SDSS EDR
• Galaxy Clustering Evolution in the UH8K Weak Lensing Fields
• Close Pairs as Proxies for Galaxy Cluster Mergers
• On the Clustering of Compact Galaxy Pairs in Dark Matter Haloes