Galaxy groups and haloes in the SDSS-DR7

TL;DR

This paper introduces a parameter-free method for identifying galaxy groups in SDSS-DR7, producing robust halo catalogs that align with known stellar mass functions and halo relations, emphasizing the importance of low luminosity components.

Contribution

A novel, parameter-free approach to galaxy group identification that does not rely on ad-hoc parameters, improving robustness and consistency with existing models.

Findings

Reproduces expected stellar mass functions

Aligns with known stellar-halo mass relations

Highlights importance of low luminosity galaxies in groups

Abstract

In this work we introduce a new method to perform the identification of groups of galaxies and present results of the identification of galaxy groups in the Seventh Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-DR7). Our methodology follows an approach that resembles the standard friends-of-friends (FoF) method. However, it uses assumptions on the mass of the dark matter halo hosting a group of galaxies to link galaxies in the group using a local linking length. Our method does not assumes any ad-hoc parameter for the identification of groups, nor a linking length or a density threshold. This parameter-free nature of the method, and the robustness of its results, are the most important points of our work. We describe the data used for our study and give details of the implementation of the method. We obtain galaxy groups and halo catalogs for four volume limited samples whose properties are in good agreement with previous works. They reproduces the expected stellar mass functions and follow the expected stellar-halo mass relation. We found that most of the stellar content in groups of galaxies comes from objects with $M_r$ absolute magnitudes larger than -19, meaning that it is important to resolve the low luminosity components of groups of galaxies to acquire detailed information about their properties.