Millions of z>0.6 Luminous Red Galaxies from BigBOSS + WISE

Details Millions of z>0.6 Luminous Red Galaxies from BigBOSS + WISE Millions of z>0.6 Luminous Red Galaxies from BigBOSS + WISE

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21933503n&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #335.03

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The most luminous red galaxies (LRGs) provide an excellent tracer of large scale structure in the Universe due to their strong clustering, but they are difficult to select at z>0.6 from optical imaging alone. We demonstrate here that simple color cuts based upon SDSS r/i-band and WISE 3.4 micron photometry allow us to efficiently select 0.6 < z < 1 LRGs while strongly rejecting stellar contaminants. This technique exploits the fact that the "1.6 micron bump" (i.e., the bolometric peak of red galaxy SEDs at 1.6 microns) lies near the center of the WISE 3.4 micron passband at z 1. We test these techniques using WISE data in fields covered by the zCOSMOS and DEEP2 survey, investigating the nature of resulting samples. Our methods select 400 candidate LRGs per square degree, yielding more than 5 million targets over the BigBOSS footprint; 97% of the objects targeted are galaxies at z>0.55, 96% of which are on the red sequence. We also explore selection using only Palomar Transient Factory r-band imaging and WISE 3.4 micron data in the COSMOS field, finding that we can still effectively select LRGs, at the cost of a contamination with bright Emission Line Galaxies which are also of interest for BigBOSS.

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