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Dynamically Close Galaxy Pairs and Merger Rate Evolution in the CNOC2 Redshift Survey

  • Authors: D. R. Patton, C. J. Pritchet, R. G. Carlberg, R. O. Marzke, H. K. C. Yee, P. B. Hall, H. Lin, S. L. Morris, M. Sawicki, C. W. Shepherd, and G. D. Wirth

Patton et al. 2002 The Astrophysical Journal 565 208.

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Fig. 3.

Spectroscopic completeness is computed for a range of angular pair separations. In the upper panel we compute the ratio of spectroscopic pairs (Nzz) to photometric pairs (Npp), as a function of angular separation θ. Error bars are computed using the Jackknife technique. With fair selection, ﹩N_{zz}/ N_{pp}=f^{2}_{s}\approx 0.1753﹩ (dashed line), as this gives an excellent fit to the completeness on large scales (﹩\theta > 3\farcm 5﹩). The incompleteness is modeled with a power law at ﹩10^{\prime \prime }< \theta < 210^{\prime \prime }﹩. This power law clearly does not provide an acceptable fit on smaller scales; hence, we take ﹩N_{zz}/ N_{pp}=0.129﹩ for ﹩\theta \leq 10^{\prime \prime }﹩. The combined fit is marked with a solid line. The observed spectroscopic completeness is corrected using weights from the modeled fit and is plotted in the lower panel. The horizontal solid line gives ﹩f^{2}_{s}=0.1753﹩. The corrected data points are consistent with this value at all separations.

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