Where are the Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs)? Using correlation measurements and lensing to relate LRGs to dark matter halos

TL;DR

This paper uses correlation measurements and lensing to study the relationship between luminous red galaxies (LRGs) and dark matter halos, revealing off-centering effects and their impact on cosmological parameter estimation.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining multiple observational probes to constrain off-centering of LRGs within halos, improving understanding of their connection to dark matter structures.

Findings

Approximately 40-70% of LRGs are off-centered satellite galaxies.

Off-centering radius is about 400 kpc/h with velocity dispersion around 500 km/s.

Residual Finger-of-God effects can bias cosmological parameters at small scales.

Abstract

Nonlinear redshift-space distortions, the Finger-of-God (FoG) effect, can complicate the interpretation of the galaxy power spectrum. Here, we demonstrate the method proposed by Hikage et al. (2012) to use complimentary observations to directly constrain this effect on the data. We use catalogs of Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) and photometric galaxies from the SDSS DR7 to measure the redshift-space power spectrum of LRGs, the cross-correlation of LRGs with the shapes of background photometric galaxies (galaxy-galaxy weak lensing), and the projected cross-correlation of LRGs with photometric galaxies having similar photometric redshifts to the LRG spectroscopic redshift. All of these measurements use a reconstructed halo field. While we use the position of each LRG for single LRG systems, we compare the measurements using different halo-center proxies for multiple-LRG systems (4.5 per cent of all the halos): the brightest LRG position (BLRG), the faintest LRG position (FLRG) and their arithmetical mean position (Mean), respectively, in each system. We find significant differences in the measured correlations of different centers, showing consistent off-centering effects in the three observables. By comparing the measurements with a halo model that treats the satellite photometric galaxies as being distributed according to a generalized NFW profile, we find that about 40 (70) per cent of BLRGs (FLRGs) are off-centered satellite galaxies in the multiple-LRG systems. The satellite LRGs have typical off-centering radius of about 400 kpc/h, and velocity dispersion of about 500 km/s in host halos with a mean mass of 1.6x10^14 Ms/h. We show that, if LRGs in the single LRG systems have similar offsets, the residual FoG contamination in the LRG power spectrum can be significant at k>0.1 h/Mpc, which may cause a bias in cosmological parameters such as the neutrino mass.