Completeness - I. Revised, reviewed and revived

Abstract

We have extended and improved the statistical test recently developed by Rauzy for assessing the completeness in apparent magnitude of magnitude-redshift surveys. Our improved test statistic retains the robust properties -- specifically independence of the spatial distribution of galaxies within a survey -- of the $T_c$ statistic introduced in Rauzy's seminal paper, but now accounts for the presence of both a faint and bright apparent magnitude limit. We demonstrate that a failure to include a bright magnitude limit can significantly affect the performance of Rauzy's $T_c$ statistic. Moreover, we have also introduced a new test statistic, $T_v$, defined in terms of the cumulative distance distribution of galaxies within a redshift survey. These test statistics represent powerful tools for identifying and characterising systematic errors in magnitude-redshift data. We apply our completeness test to three major redshift surveys: The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue (MGC), The Two Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We confirm that MGC and SDSS are complete up to the published (faint) apparent magnitude limit Furthermore, we show that, unless a bright limit is included for 2dFGRS, the data-set displays significant incompleteness at magnitudes brighter than the published limit of $m_{b_j}=19.45$ mag.

12 pages, 7 figures. MNRAS accepted

References in corpus (18)

• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• Spectroscopic Target Selection in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Main Galaxy Sample
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Photometric Camera
• The u'g'r'i'z' Standard Star Network
• Spectroscopic Target Selection for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Luminous Red Galaxy Sample
• The First Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Astrometric Calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• A photometricity and extinction monitor at the Apache Point Observatory
• An Efficient Algorithm for Positioning Tiles in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: The dependence of galaxy clustering on luminosity and spectral type
• The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: The b_J-band galaxy luminosity function and survey selection function
• The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: Luminosity dependence of galaxy clustering
• Early-type galaxies in the SDSS. I. The sample
• Colors, magnitudes and velocity dispersions in early-type galaxies: Implications for galaxy ages and metallicities
• The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue: the space density and surface brightness distribution(s) of galaxies
• The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: The Number and Luminosity Density of Galaxies
• The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue: The photometric accuracy, completeness and contamination of the 2dFGRS and SDSS-EDR & DR1 datasets
• A simple tool for assessing the completeness in apparent magnitude of magnitude-redshift samples

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Shedding Light on the Galaxy Luminosity Function
• The Parkes HI Zone of Avoidance Survey
• Rates and delay times of type Ia supernovae in the Dark Energy Survey
• Completeness II: A signal-to-noise approach for completeness estimators applied to galaxy magnitude-redshift surveys
• Neural Posterior Estimation for Cataloging Astronomical Images with Spatially Varying Backgrounds and Point Spread Functions
• Completeness III: identifying characteristic systematics and evolution in galaxy redshift surveys