Published June 20, 2016 | Version v1
Journal article

RESOLVE AND ECO: THE HALO MASS-DEPENDENT SHAPE OF GALAXY STELLAR AND BARYONIC MASS FUNCTIONS

  • 1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of North Carolina, 141 Chapman Hall CB 3255, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (United States)
  • 2. International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009 (Australia)

Description

In this work, we present galaxy stellar and baryonic (stars plus cold gas) mass functions (SMF and BMF) and their halo mass dependence for two volume-limited data sets. The first, RESOLVE-B, coincides with the Stripe 82 footprint and is extremely complete down to baryonic mass M bary ∼ 109.1 M , probing the gas-rich dwarf regime below M bary ∼ 1010 M . The second, ECO, covers a ∼40× larger volume (containing RESOLVE-A) and is complete to M bary ∼ 109.4 M . To construct the SMF and BMF we implement a new "cross-bin sampling" technique with Monte Carlo sampling from the full likelihood distributions of stellar or baryonic mass. Our SMFs exhibit the "plateau" feature starting below M star ∼ 1010 M that has been described in prior work. However, the BMF fills in this feature and rises as a straight power law below ∼1010 M , as gas-dominated galaxies become the majority of the population. Nonetheless, the low-mass slope of the BMF is not as steep as that of the theoretical dark matter halo MF. Moreover, we assign group halo masses by abundance matching, finding that the SMF and BMF, separated into four physically motivated halo mass regimes, reveal complex structure underlying the simple shape of the overall MFs. In particular, the satellite MFs are depressed below the central galaxy MF "humps" in groups with mass <1013.5 M yet rise steeply in clusters. Our results suggest that satellite destruction and stripping are active from the point of nascent group formation. We show that the key role of groups in shaping MFs enables reconstruction of a given survey's SMF or BMF based on its group halo mass distribution.

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/0004-637X/824/2/124

Additional details

Identifiers

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Astrophysical Journal
Journal Volume
824
Journal Issue
2
Journal Page Range
[29 p.]
ISSN
0004-637X
CODEN
ASJOAB