Verifying the Identity of High-Redshift Massive Galaxies Through the Clustering of Lower Mass Galaxies Around Them

TL;DR

This paper proposes a clustering-based method to verify the high-redshift nature of massive galaxies by analyzing the surrounding galaxy distribution, and applies it to challenge a previously suggested z~6.5 galaxy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel clustering approach to confirm galaxy redshifts, providing a statistical framework to distinguish true high-redshift galaxies from low-redshift interlopers.

Findings

High-redshift galaxies should have detectable neighboring galaxies due to clustering.

The absence of expected neighbors suggests the galaxy is likely a low-redshift interloper.

The method can be generalized to other galaxy masses and redshifts.

Abstract

Massive high-redshift galaxies form in over-dense regions where the probability of forming other galaxies is also strongly enhanced. Given an observed flux of a galaxy, the inferred mass of its host halo tends to be larger as its inferred redshift increases. As the mass and redshift of a galaxy halo increase, the expected clustering of other galaxies around it gets stronger. It is therefore possible to verify the high-redshift identity of a galaxy (prior to an unambiguous spectral identification) from the clustering of other galaxies around it. We illustrate this method for the massive galaxy suggested by Mobasher et al. (2005) to be at redshift z~6.5. If this galaxy were to exist at z~6.5, there should have been a mean of ~10 galaxies larger than a hundredth of its mass and having z-band magnitudes less than ~25 detected as i-dropouts in the HUDF. We calculate an approximate probability distribution for neighbor galaxies and determine that there is less than a ~0.3% chance of detecting no massive neighbor galaxies. The lack of other massive z~6.5 galaxies in the HUDF image argues that the Mobasher et al. (2005) galaxy is instead a low redshift interloper. We generalize our results to other galaxy masses and redshifts.