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Published November 2001 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Spectroscopic Target Selection for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Luminous Red Galaxy Sample

Abstract

We describe the target selection and resulting properties of a spectroscopic sample of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from the imaging data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). These galaxies are selected on the basis of color and magnitude to yield a sample of luminous intrinsically red galaxies that extends fainter and farther than the main flux-limited portion of the SDSS galaxy spectroscopic sample. The sample is designed to impose a passively evolving luminosity and rest-frame color cut to a redshift of 0.38. Additional, yet more luminous red galaxies are included to a redshift of ~0.5. Approximately 12 of these galaxies per square degree are targeted for spectroscopy, so the sample will number over 100,000 with the full survey. SDSS commissioning data indicate that the algorithm efficiently selects luminous (M^+_g ≈ -21.4) red galaxies, that the spectroscopic success rate is very high, and that the resulting set of galaxies is approximately volume limited out to z = 0.38. When the SDSS is complete, the LRG spectroscopic sample will fill over 1 h^(-3) Gpc^3 with an approximately homogeneous population of galaxies and will therefore be well suited to studies of large-scale structure and clusters out to z = 0.5.

Additional Information

© 2001. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2001 July 10; accepted 2001 August 8. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a joint project of the University of Chicago, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics, New Mexico State University, Princeton University, the US Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington. Apache Point Observatory, site of the SDSS telescopes, is operated by the Astrophysical Research Consortium. Funding for the project has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the SDSS member institutions, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, and the Max Planck Society. We thank Michael Blanton, Doug Finkbeiner, and Ann Zabludoff for useful conversations, Rob Kennicutt and Rolf Jansen for supplying their spectrophotometry in electronic form, and Stéphane Charlot for supplying his latest population synthesis models. D. J. E. was supported by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HF-01118.01-99A from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc, under NASA contract NAS 5-26555, as well as by the Frank and Peggy Taplin Membership at the IAS.

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Created:
August 21, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023