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Published November 11, 2007 | Published
Journal Article Open

Clustering of galaxies at 3.6 μm in the Spitzer Wide-area Infrared Extragalactic legacy survey

Abstract

We investigate the clustering of galaxies selected in the 3.6 μm band of the Spitzer Wide-area Infrared Extragalactic (SWIRE) legacy survey. The angular two-point correlation function is calculated for 11 samples with flux limits of S_(3.6)≥ 4–400 μJy, over an 8 deg^2 field. The angular clustering strength is measured at >5σ significance at all flux limits, with amplitudes of A = (0.49–29) × 10^(−3) at 1°, for a power-law model, Aθ^(−0.8). We estimate the redshift distributions of the samples using phenomological models, simulations and photometric redshifts, and so derive the spatial correlation lengths. We compare our results with the Galaxies In Cosmological Simulations (GalICS) models of galaxy evolution and with parametrized models of clustering evolution. The GalICS simulations are consistent with our angular correlation functions, but fail to match the spatial clustering inferred from the phenomological models or the photometric redshifts. We find that the uncertainties in the redshift distributions of our samples dominate the statistical errors in our estimates of the spatial clustering. At low redshifts (median z ≤ 0.5), the comoving correlation length is approximately constant, r_0= 6.1 ± 0.5 h^(−1) Mpc, and then decreases with increasing redshift to a value of 2.9 ± 0.3 h^(−1) Mpc for the faintest sample, for which the median redshift is z ~ 1. We suggest that this trend can be attributed to a decrease in the average galaxy and halo mass in the fainter flux-limited samples, corresponding to changes in the relative numbers of early- and late-type galaxies. However, we cannot rule out strong evolution of the correlation length over 0.5 < z < 1 .

Additional Information

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 RAS. Accepted 2007 August 15. Received 2007 July 26; in original form 2006 October 4. Published Online: 26 Oct 2007. The pair-counting code NPT was provided by The Auton Lab at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science (http://www.autonlab.org) and we thank Andrew Moore et al. for making this software public. This work was funded by PPARC research grants to Seb Oliver. Support for this work, part of the Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy Science Programme, was provided by NASA through a contract issued by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA.

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