The Evolution of the Massive Galaxy Luminosity Function Over Half of Cosmic History

Details The Evolution of the Massive Galaxy Luminosity Function Over Half of Cosmic History The Evolution of the Massive Galaxy Luminosity Function Over Half of Cosmic History

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.3803c&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #38.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The popular model for the formation of early-type galaxies is the hierarchical merging scenario. However, the details of the frequency and efficiency of merging are not yet known, particularly in dense environments. The high-mass end of the galaxy luminosity function, as the extreme example of the merging phenomenon, is the most sensitive to various merger model assumptions. While L* early-type galaxies are being observed in ever-growing numbers even at moderate redshifts with the advent of many new deep redshift surveys, the most massive systems are very rare and thus any pencil-beam survey will be severely limited by cosmic variance at the high mass end. By taking advantage of the 1 degree diameter field available for multi-object spectroscopy with the Hectospec spectrograph on the MMT, we have completed a spectroscopic survey of 5 square degrees targeting massive early-type galaxies out to z 0.8. Pairing our observations at z 0.8 with a sample of massive galaxies at low-redshift from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we measure the evolution of the luminosity function of the most massive galaxies over half of the history of the universe and use this measurement to constrain the merger histories of the most massive galaxies.

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