1701.06066
Environmental dependence of the galaxy stellar mass function in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification Data
Etherington et al
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. DES provides large photometric datasets that enable further investigation of the assembly of mass. In this study, use ~3.2 million galaxies from the SPT-East field in the DES SV dataset. From grizY photometry, derive galaxy stellar masses and absolute magnitudes, and determine the errors on these properties using MC sims using the full photo-z probability distributions. Compute galaxy environments using a fixed conical aperture for a range of scales. Construct galaxy environment probability distribution functions and investigate the dependence of the environment errors on the aperture parameters. Compute the environment components of the galaxy stellar mass function for the redshift range 0.15<z<1.05. For z<0.75 find that the fraction of massive galaxies is larger in high density environment than in low density environments. Show that the low density and high density components converge with increasing redshift up to z~1.0 where the shapes of the mass function components are indistinguishable. The study shows how high density structures build up around massive galaxies through cosmic time.
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