Authors:
Favole, Ginevra;Montero-Dorta, Antonio D.;Prada, Francisco;Rodríguez-Torres, Sergio A.;Schlegel, David J.
Journal:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Abstract:
We use the DECaLS DR3 survey photometry matched to the SDSS-III/BOSS DR12 spectroscopic catalog to investigate the morphology and stellar mass-size relation of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) within the CMASS and LOWZ galaxy samples in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. The large majority of both samples is composed of early-type galaxies with De Vaucouleurs profiles, while only less than 20% are late-type exponentials. We calibrate DECaLS effective radii using the higher resolution CFHT/MegaCam observations and optimise the correction for each morphological type. By cross-matching the photometric properties of the early-type population with the Portsmouth stellar mass catalog, we are able to explore the high-mass end of the distribution using a large sample of 322,994 galaxies over 4380 deg<SUP>2</SUP>. We find a clear correlation between the sizes and the stellar masses of these galaxies, which appears flatter than previous estimates at lower masses. The sizes of these early-type galaxies do not exhibit significant evolution within the BOSS redshift range, but a slightly declining redshift trend is found when these results are combined with z ̃ 0.1 SDSS measurements at the high-mass end. The synergy between BOSS and DECaLS has important applications in other fields, including galaxy clustering and weak lensing.
URL:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2018MNRAS.480.1415F/abstract
Keywords:
galaxies: distances and redshifts;galaxies: evolution;galaxies: photometry;galaxies: structure;galaxies: statistics;cosmology: observations