The Dragonfly Wide Field Survey. II. Accurate Total Luminosities and Colors of Nearby Massive Galaxies and Implications for the Galaxy Stellar Mass Function

TL;DR

This study uses the Dragonfly Wide Field Survey to accurately measure the total luminosities and colors of nearby massive galaxies, revealing systematic differences from previous methods that impact stellar mass estimates and galaxy number densities.

Contribution

It introduces a minimally dependent method for measuring total luminosities and colors of massive galaxies, improving accuracy over traditional SDSS-based methods.

Findings

Galaxies are brighter in r band by ~0.05 mag

Galaxies are bluer in g-r by ~0.06 mag

Stellar mass estimates decrease by ~7% compared to previous methods

Abstract

Stellar mass estimates of massive galaxies are susceptible to systematic errors in their photometry, due to their extended light profiles. In this study we use data from the Dragonfly Wide Field Survey (DWFS) to accurately measure the total luminosities and colors of nearby massive galaxies. The low surface brightness limits of the survey ($\mu_g \approx $ 31 mag arcsec $^{-2}$ on a one arcmin scale) allows us to implement a method, based on integrating the 1-D surface brightness profile, that is minimally dependent on any parameterization. We construct a sample of 1188 massive galaxies with $\log M_*/M_\odot > 10.75$ based on the Galaxy Mass and Assembly (GAMA) survey and measure their total luminosities and $g-r$ colors. We then compare our measurements to various established methods applied to imaging from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), focusing on those favored by the GAMA survey. In general, we find that galaxies are brighter in the $r$ band by an average of ${\sim}0.05$ mag and bluer in $g-r$ colors by $\sim 0.06$ mag compared to the GAMA measurements. These two differences have opposite effects on the stellar mass estimates. The total luminosities are larger by $5\%$ but the mass-to-light ratios are lower by $\sim 10\%$. The combined effect is that the stellar mass estimate of massive galaxies decreases by $7\%$. This, in turn, implies a small change in number density of massive galaxies: $\leq 30\%$ at $\log M_*/M_\odot \geq 11$.