The 2MASS Redshift Survey—Description and Data Release

Creators: Huchra, John P.; Macri, Lucas M.; Masters, Karen L.; Jarrett, Thomas H.; Berlind, Perry; Calkins, Michael; Crook, Aiden C.; Cutri, Roc; Erdoğdu, Pirin; Falco, Emilio; George, Teddy; Hutcheson, Conrad M.; Lahav, Ofer; Mader, Jeff; Mink, Jessica D.; Martimbeau, Nathalie; Schneider, Stephen; Skrutskie, Michael; Tokarz, Susan; Westover, Michael

Abstract

We present the results of the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS), a ten-year project to map the full three-dimensional distribution of galaxies in the nearby universe. The Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) was completed in 2003 and its final data products, including an extended source catalog (XSC), are available online. The 2MASS XSC contains nearly a million galaxies with K_s ≤ 13.5 mag and is essentially complete and mostly unaffected by interstellar extinction and stellar confusion down to a galactic latitude of |b| = 5° for bright galaxies. Near-infrared wavelengths are sensitive to the old stellar populations that dominate galaxy masses, making 2MASS an excellent starting point to study the distribution of matter in the nearby universe. We selected a sample of 44,599 2MASS galaxies with K_s ≤ 11.75 mag and |b| ≥ 5° (≥8° toward the Galactic bulge) as the input catalog for our survey. We obtained spectroscopic observations for 11,000 galaxies and used previously obtained velocities for the remainder of the sample to generate a redshift catalog that is 97.6% complete to well-defined limits and covers 91% of the sky. This provides an unprecedented census of galaxy (baryonic mass) concentrations within 300 Mpc. Earlier versions of our survey have been used in a number of publications that have studied the bulk motion of the Local Group, mapped the density and peculiar velocity fields out to 50 h^(–1) Mpc, detected galaxy groups, and estimated the values of several cosmological parameters. Additionally, we present morphological types for a nearly complete sub-sample of 20,860 galaxies with K_s ≤ 11.25 mag and |b| ≥ 10°.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 July 29; accepted 2011 December 17; published 2012 March 14. This paper was written in part while J.P.H. was a Sackler visitor at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK. We also thank the staff at the Fred. L. Whipple, Cerro Tololo, and McDonald Observatories, and the entire 2MASS team. J.P.H., K.L.M., and A.C.C. acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation under grant AST-0406906 and by the Smithsonian Institution. L.M.M. acknowledges support by the Smithsonian Institution Visiting Scholar program, by NASA through Hubble Fellowship Grant HST-HF-01153 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, by the National Science Foundation through a Goldberg Fellowship from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and by the Texas A&M University Mitchell-Heep-Munnerlyn Endowed Career Enhancement Professorship in Physics or Astronomy. K.L.M. acknowledges funding from the Leverhulme Trust as a 2010 Early Career Fellow and from the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation as the 2008 IAU Fellow. C.M.H. was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates under grant No. 9731923. O.L. acknowledges support from a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. J.P.H. and L.M.M. were visiting astronomers at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under contract with the National Science Foundation. This publication has made use of the following resources. 1. Data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. 2. The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 3. The 6dF Galaxy Survey (DR3), supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Projects Grant (DP-0208876). The 6dFGS web site is http://www.aao.gov.au/local/ www/6df/. 4. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (DR8). Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The SDSS-III Web site is http://www.sdss3.org/. SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of Cambridge, the University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, New Mexico State University, New York University, The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, the University of Tokyo, the University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, and Yale University. 5. The VizieR catalog access tool operated at the CDS, Strasbourg, France. 6. The Digitized Sky Surveys, produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government Grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. 7. NASA's Astrophysics Data System at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Typing services provided by Fang, Inc. Facilities: FLWO:1.5m (FAST), CTIO:1.5m (RCSpec), Blanco (RCSPec), Struve (es2), HET (LRS)

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