Mocking the ECO and RESOLVE Surveys: Probing the Environmental Dependencies of Galaxy Properties
Abstract
We present mock catalogs for the RESOLVE survey and the associated Environmental COntext (ECO) catalog. The mock catalogs are constructed by populating dark matter halos in cosmological N-body simulations with galaxies using prescriptions that yield the same joint distributions of galaxy properties and overall clustering strength as seen in the ECO catalog. Specifically, we use a combination of Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD), Conditional Luminosity Function (CLF), and abundance matching techniques to connect mock galaxies to halos and we adopt different assumptions of how observable properties correlate with the properties of the underlying halos. We use the resulting mock catalogs to assess systematic errors in environmental metrics, such as errors in the inferred masses of galaxy groups that are due to group over-merging or fragmentation. We also use the mock catalogs to compare to an interesting trend that we find for galaxies that live in the 10% lowest density environments in ECO and RESOLVE. In the observations, we find that, at fixed stellar or baryonic mass, these galaxies in low density regions are bluer, more star forming, and more gas rich than galaxies residing in higher density environments. Some mock-making prescriptions are more successful than others in matching this observed trend, highlighting the power of mock catalogs to connect observations to the underlying relationships between galaxies and their dark matter halos. The RESOLVE survey is supported by NSF grant AST-0955368.
- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #227
- Pub Date:
- January 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AAS...22731104B