The Redshift Evolution of the High-Mass End of the Red Sequence Luminosity Function from the SDSS-III/BOSS CMASS Sample
Publication information:
Montero-Dorta A, Bolton A, Brownstein J, Swanson M, Dawson K, Prada F, Eisenstein D, Maraston C, Thomas D, Comparat J, et al. The Redshift Evolution of the High-Mass End of the Red Sequence Luminosity Function from the SDSS-III/BOSS CMASS Sample. ArXiv e-prints. 2014;1410:5854.
Abstract
We present the redshift evolution of the high-mass end of the^{0.55}i-band Red Sequence Luminosity Function (RS LF) within theredshift range 0.520.65, obtained from the DR10 BOSS CMASSsample, which comprises ~ 600,000 galaxies. We have developed ananalytical method based on an unbinned maximum likelihood approach fordeconvolving the observed CMASS distribution from photometric errors andaccounting for selection effects. This procedure requires modeling thecovariance matrix for the i-band magnitude, g-r color and r-i colorusing Stripe 82 multi-epoch data. The error-deconvolved intrinsic RSdistribution is consistent with a single point in the color-color plane,which implies that the great majority of the observed scatter is due tophotometric errors. We estimate that RS completeness is ~0.80-0.85 atz\geq0.52 in the CMASS sample, dropping drastically below that redshift.