Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Project. I. Catalog Construction, Kevin Bundy, Alexie Leauthaud, Shun Saito, For Full List Of Authors, See Publisher's Website.

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Catalog (S82-MGC) is the largest-volume stellar mass-limited sample of galaxies beyond z ≈ 0.1 constructed to date. Spanning 139.4 deg², the S82-MGC includes a mass-limited sample of 41,770 galaxies with log M_*/M_⊙ ≳ 11.2 to z ≈ 0.7, sampling a volume of 0.3 Gpc³, roughly equivalent to the volume of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-I/II (SDSS-I/II) z < 0.15 main sample. The catalog is built on three pillars of survey data: the SDSS Stripe 82 Coadd photometry which reaches r-band magnitudes of ∼23.5 AB, Y JHK photometry at depths of 20th magnitude (AB) from the UK Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey, and over 70,000 spectroscopic galaxy redshifts from the SDSS-I/II and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We describe the catalog construction and verification, the production of 9-band matched aperture photometry, tests of existing and newly estimated photometric redshifts required to supplement spectroscopic redshifts for 55% of the log M_*/M_⊙ ≳ 11.2 sample, and geometric masking. We provide near-IR based stellar mass estimates and compare these to previous estimates. All catalog products are made publicly available. The S82-MGC …