Very Small Scale Clustering and Merger Rate of Luminous Red Galaxies
Publication information:
Masjedi M, Hogg D, Cool R, Eisenstein D, Blanton M, Zehavi I, Berlind A, Bell E, Schneider D, Warren M, et al. Very Small Scale Clustering and Merger Rate of Luminous Red Galaxies. The Astrophysical Journal. 2006;644:54–60.
Abstract
We present the small-scale (0.01 Mpc-1 Mpc)projected correlation function wp(rp) andreal-space correlation function ξ(r) of 24,520 luminous early-typegalaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Luminous Red Galaxy(LRG) sample (0.16-2 power law over more than 4 orders of magnitudein separation r. This result is too steep at small scales to beexplained in current versions of the halo model for galaxy clustering.We infer an LRG-LRG merger rate of <~0.6×104Gyr-1 Gpc-3 for this sample. This result suggeststhat the LRG-LRG mergers are not the main mode of mass growth for LRGsat z<0.36.