The clustering of Luminous Red Galaxies around MgII absorbers

Abstract

We study the cross-correlation between 212 MgII quasar absorption systems and \~20,000 Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 1 in the redshift range 0.4<z<0.8. The MgII systems were selected to have 2796 & 2803 rest-frame equivalent widths >=1.0 Angstrom and identifications confirmed by the FeII 2600 or MgI 2852 lines. Over comoving scales 0.05--13 h^-1 Mpc, the MgII--LRG cross-correlation has an amplitude 0.69+/-0.09 times that of the LRG--LRG auto-correlation. Since LRGs have halo-masses greater than 3.5 x 10^12 solar masses for M_R<-21, this relative amplitude implies that the absorber host-galaxies have halo-masses greater than 2--8 x 10^11 Msun. For 10^13 Msun LRGs, the absorber host-galaxies have halo-masses 0.5--2.5 x 10^12 Msun. Our results appear consistent with those of Steidel et al. (1994) who found that MgII absorbers with W_r>=0.3 Angstrom are associated with ~0.7 L^*_B galaxies.

7 pages, 3 figs; Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters; Extended version with Appendix; Text version of MgII absorber catalogue (Table 1) can be found at http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~mim/pub.html. Minor changes to match the published text

Cited by in corpus (26)

• Cosmic dynamics in the era of Extremely Large Telescopes
• New perspectives on strong z=0.5 MgII absorbers: are halo-mass and equivalent width anti-correlated?
• Quasars Probing Quasars VI. Excess HI Absorption Within One Proper Mpc of z~2 Quasars
• The SINFONI MgII Program for Line Emitters (SIMPLE): Discovering starbursts near QSO sight-lines
• The Large-scale Distribution of Cool Gas around Luminous Red Galaxies
• A Cross-Correlation Analysis of Mg II Absorption Line Systems and Luminous Red Galaxies from the SDSS DR5
• On the Incidence of Strong MgII Absorbers Along GRB Sightlines
• The Baryon Content of Dark Matter Halos: Empirical Constraints from MgII Absorbers
• The Clustering of MgII Absorption Systems at z=0.5 and Detection of Cold Gas in Massive Halos
• On the Halo Occupation of Dark Baryons
• Probing the IGM-Galaxy Connection Toward PKS0405-123 II : A Cross-Correlation Study of Lya Absorbers and Galaxies at z<0.5
• Cross correlation of Lyman-alpha absorbers with gas-rich galaxies
• The Low-Redshift Lyman Alpha Forest toward PKS 0405-123
• The Red Dead Redemption Survey of Circumgalactic Gas About Massive Galaxies. I. Mass and Metallicity of the Cool Phase
• A model for the metallicity evolution of damped Lyman-alpha systems
• Measuring the Halo Mass of z=3 Damped Ly-alpha Absorbers from the Absorber-Galaxy Cross-correlation
• The association between gas and galaxies I: CFHT spectroscopy and pair analysis
• The association between gas and galaxies II: The 2-point correlation function
• On the Observed W_MgII--L_[OII] Correlation in SDSS QSO Spectra
• The Cross-correlation of MgII Absorption and Galaxies in BOSS
• Intervening Mg II absorption systems from the SDSS DR12 quasar spectra
• The Dark Matter Haloes and Host Galaxies of MgII Absorbers at z~1
• Direct Observational Test Rules Out Small MgII Absorbers
• Halo Masses of MgII absorbers at z\sim 0.5 from SDSS DR7
• Multi-phase gas properties of extremely strong intervening DLAs towards quasars
• Investigating the Circumgalactic Medium through Mg II absorption coincidence