Environmental dependence of the galaxy stellar mass function in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification Data

• Published in: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Main Authors: Etherington, J., Thomas, D., Maraston, C., Sevilla-Noarbe, I., Bechtol, K., Pforr, J., Pellegrini, P., Gschwend, J., Rosell, A. Carnero, Maia, M. A. G., Costa, L. N. da, Benoit-Lévy, A., Swanson, M. E. C., Hartley, W. G., Abbott, T. M. C., Abdalla, F. B., Allam, S., Bernstein, R. A., Bertin, E., Brooks, D., Buckley-Geer, E., Kind, M. Carrasco, Carretero, J., Castander, F. J., Crocce, M., Cunha, C. E., Desai, S., Doel, P., Eifler, T. F., Evrard, A. E., Neto, A. Fausti, Finley, D. A., Flaugher, B., Fosalba, P., Frieman, J., Gerdes, D. W., Gruen, D., Gruendl, R. A., Gutierrez, G., Honscheid, K., James, D. J., Kuehn, K., Kuropatkin, N., Lahav, O., Lima, M., Martini, P., Melchior, P., Miquel, R., Mohr, J. J., Nord, B., Ogando, R., Plazas, A. A., Romer, A. K., Rykoff, E. S., Sanchez, E., Scarpine, V., Schubnell, M., Smith, R. C., Soares-Santos, M., Sobreira, F., Tarle, G., Vikram, V., Walker, A. R., Zhang, Y.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: astro-ph.GA; astro-ph.CO; RCUK; STFC; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw3069; https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/environmental-dependence-of-the-galaxy-stellar-mass-function-in-the-dark-energy-survey-science-verification-data(5cc65b5a-74b2-4b7e-ab7e-a0388a6d3c18).html; https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/ws/files/6265195/1701.06066v1

Measurements of the galaxy stellar mass function are crucial to understand the formation of galaxies in the Universe. In a hierarchical clustering paradigm it is plausible that there is a connection between the properties of galaxies and their environments. Evidence for environmental trends has been established in the local Universe. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) provides large photometric datasets that enable further investigation of the assembly of mass. In this study we use ~3.2 million galaxies from the (South Pole Telescope) SPT-East field in the DES science verification (SV) dataset. From grizY photometry we derive galaxy stellar masses and absolute magnitudes, and determine the errors on these properties using Monte-Carlo simulations using the full photometric redshift probability distributions. We compute galaxy environments using a fixed conical aperture for a range of scales. We construct galaxy environment probability distribution functions and investigate the dependence of the environment errors on the aperture parameters. We compute the environment components of the galaxy stellar mass function for the redshift range 0.15zz