Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): the galaxy luminosity function within the cosmic web

Eardley, E.; Peacock, J.A.; McNaught-Roberts, T.; Heymans, C.; Norberg, P.; Alpaslan, M.; Baldry, I.; Bland-Hawthorn, J.; Brough, S.; Cluver, M.E.; Driver, S.P.; Farrow, D.J.; Liske, J.; Loveday, J.; Robotham, A.S.G.

doi:10.1093/mnras/stv237

Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): the galaxy luminosity function within the cosmic web

Eardley, E.; Peacock, J.A.; McNaught-Roberts, T.; Heymans, C.; Norberg, P.; Alpaslan, M.; Baldry, I.; Bland-Hawthorn, J.; Brough, S.; Cluver, M.E.; Driver, S.P.; Farrow, D.J.; Liske, J.; Loveday, J.; Robotham, A.S.G.

Authors

E. Eardley

J.A. Peacock

T. McNaught-Roberts

C. Heymans

Professor Peder Norberg peder.norberg@durham.ac.uk
Professor

M. Alpaslan

I. Baldry

J. Bland-Hawthorn

S. Brough

M.E. Cluver

S.P. Driver

D.J. Farrow

J. Liske

J. Loveday

A.S.G. Robotham

Abstract

We investigate the dependence of the galaxy luminosity function on geometric environment within the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. The tidal tensor prescription, based on the Hessian of the pseudo-gravitational potential, is used to classify the cosmic web and define the geometric environments: for a given smoothing scale, we classify every position of the surveyed region, 0.04 < z < 0.26, as either a void, a sheet, a filament or a knot. We consider how to choose appropriate thresholds in the eigenvalues of the Hessian in order to partition the galaxies approximately evenly between environments. We find a significant variation in the luminosity function of galaxies between different geometric environments; the normalization, characterized by ϕ* in a Schechter function fit, increases by an order of magnitude from voids to knots. The turnover magnitude, characterized by M*, brightens by approximately 0.5 mag from voids to knots. However, we show that the observed modulation can be entirely attributed to the indirect local-density dependence. We therefore find no evidence of a direct influence of the cosmic web on the galaxy luminosity function.

Citation

Eardley, E., Peacock, J., McNaught-Roberts, T., Heymans, C., Norberg, P., Alpaslan, M., …Robotham, A. (2015). Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): the galaxy luminosity function within the cosmic web. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 448(4), 3665-3678. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv237

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Feb 3, 2015
Publication Date	Apr 21, 2015
Deposit Date	Feb 3, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Feb 11, 2016
Journal	Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN	0035-8711
Electronic ISSN	1365-2966
Publisher	Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	448
Issue	4
Pages	3665-3678
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv237
Keywords	Surveys, Galaxies: luminosity function, mass function, Cosmology: observations, Large-scale structure of Universe.

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This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2015 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.