Light-Cone Distortion of the Clustering and Abundance of Massive Galaxies at High-Redshifts

TL;DR

This paper investigates how light-cone effects distort the observed clustering and abundance of high-redshift massive galaxies, especially in broad-band dropout surveys, leading to biases in inferred galaxy properties.

Contribution

It quantifies the impact of light-cone effects on galaxy surveys and provides corrections for more accurate galaxy abundance and clustering measurements at high redshift.

Findings

Light-cone effects cause a bias in the inferred galaxy mass function.

The bias results in an overestimation of high-mass galaxy abundance.

Statistical moments of galaxy counts are significantly affected by light-cone distortions.

Abstract

Observational surveys of galaxies are not trivially related to single-epoch snapshots from computer simulations. Observationally, an increase in the distance along the line-of-sight corresponds to an earlier cosmic time at which the properties of the surveyed galaxy population may change. The effect of observing a survey volume along the light-cone must be considered in the regime where the mass function of galaxies varies exponentially with redshift. This occurs when the halos under consideration are rare, that is either when they are very massive or observed at high-redshift. While the effect of the light-cone is negligible for narrow-band surveys of Lyman-alpha emitters, it can be significant for drop-out surveys of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) where the selection functions of the photometric bands are broad. Since there are exponentially more halos at the low-redshift end of the survey, the low-redshift tail of the selection function contains a disproportionate fraction of the galaxies observed in the survey. This leads to a redshift probability distribution (RPD) for the dropout LBGs with a mean less than that of the photometric selection function (PHSF) by an amount of order the standard deviation of the PHSF. The inferred mass function of galaxies is then shallower than the true mass function at a single redshift with the abundance at the high-mass end being twice or more as large as expected. Moreover, the statistical moments of the count of galaxies calculated ignoring the light-cone effect, deviate from the actual values.