Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Measuring The Halo Mass Of Z ∼ 3 Damped Lyα Absorbers From The Absorber-Galaxy Cross-Correlation, Nicolas Bouché, Jeffrey P. Gardner, Neal Katz, David H. Weinberg, Romeel Davé, James D. Lowenthal

Astronomy: Faculty Publications

We test the reliability of a method to measure the mean halo mass of absorption-line systems such as damped Lyα absorbers (DLAs). The method is based on measuring the ratio of the cross-correlation between DLAs and galaxies to the autocorrelation of the galaxies themselves, which is (in linear theory) the ratio of their bias factor b. We show that the ratio of the projected cross- and autocorrelation functions [W (r )/w (r )] is also the ratio of their bias factor, irrespective of the galaxy distribution, provided that one uses the same galaxies for w (r ) and w (r …