The Cosmic Abundance of Classical Milky Way Satellites

We study the abundance of satellites akin to the brightest, classical dwarf spheroidals around galaxies similar in magnitude and isolation to the Milky Way and M31 in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. From a combination of photometric and spectroscopic redshifts, we bound the mean and the intrinsic scatter in the number of satellites down to ten magnitudes fainter than the Milky Way. Restricting to magnitudes brighter than Sagittarius, we show that the Milky Way is not a significant statistical outlier in its population of classical dwarf spheroidals. At fainter magnitudes, we find an upper limit of 13 on the mean number of satellites brighter than the Fornax dwarf spheroidal. Methods to improve these limits that utilize full photometric redshift distributions hold promise, but are currently limited by incompleteness at the very lowest redshifts. Theoretical models are left to explain why the majority of dark matter subhalos that orbit Milky Way-like galaxies are inefficient at making galaxies at the luminosity scale of the brightest dwarf spheroidals, or why these subhalos predicted by Lambda-CDM do not exist.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

The Rockstar Phase-Space Temporal Halo Finder and the Velocity Offsets of Cluster Cores

We present a new algorithm for identifying dark matter halos, substructure, and tidal features. The approach is based on adaptive hierarchical refinement of friends-of-friends groups in six phase-space dimensions and one time dimension, which allows for robust (grid-independent, shape-independent, and noise-resilient) tracking of substructure; as such, it is named Rockstar (Robust Overdensity Calculation using K-Space Topologically Adaptive Refinement). Our method is massively parallel (up to 10^5 CPUs) and runs on the largest current simulations (>10^10 particles) with high efficiency (10 CPU hours and 60 gigabytes of memory required per billion particles analyzed). A previous paper (Knebe et al 2011) has shown Rockstar to have class-leading recovery of halo properties; we expand on these comparisons with more tests and higher-resolution simulations. We show a significant improvement in substructure recovery as compared to several other halo finders and discuss the theoretical and practical limits of simulations in this regard. Finally, we present results which demonstrate conclusively that dark matter halo cores are not at rest relative to the halo bulk or satellite average velocities and have coherent velocity offsets across a wide range of halo masses and redshifts. For massive clusters, these offsets can be up to 350 km/s at z=0 and even higher at high redshifts. Our implementation is publicly available at http://code.google.com/p/rockstar .Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures. Minor revisions to match accepted versio

A Comprehensive Analysis of Uncertainties Affecting the Stellar Mass - Halo Mass Relation for 0<z<4

We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between central galaxies and their host dark matter halos, as characterized by the stellar mass-halo mass (SM-HM) relation, with rigorous consideration of uncertainties. Our analysis focuses on results from the abundance matching technique, which assumes that every dark matter halo or subhalo above a specific mass threshold hosts one galaxy. We discuss the quantitative effects of uncertainties in observed galaxy stellar mass functions (GSMFs) (including stellar mass estimates and counting uncertainties), halo mass functions (including cosmology and uncertainties from substructure), and the abundance matching technique used to link galaxies to halos (including scatter in this connection). Our analysis results in a robust estimate of the SM-HM relation and its evolution from z=0 to z=4. The shape and evolution are well constrained for z < 1. The largest uncertainties at these redshifts are due to stellar mass estimates; however, failure to account for scatter in stellar masses at fixed halo mass can lead to errors of similar magnitude in the SM-HM relation for central galaxies in massive halos. We also investigate the SM-HM relation to z=4, although the shape of the relation at higher redshifts remains fairly unconstrained when uncertainties are taken into account. These results will provide a powerful tool to inform galaxy evolution models. [Abridged]Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures, updated to match ApJ accepted version

Optical Cluster-Finding with An Adaptive Matched-Filter Technique: Algorithm and Comparison with Simulations

We present a modified adaptive matched filter algorithm designed to identify clusters of galaxies in wide-field imaging surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The cluster-finding technique is fully adaptive to imaging surveys with spectroscopic coverage, multicolor photometric redshifts, no redshift information at all, and any combination of these within one survey. It works with high efficiency in multi-band imaging surveys where photometric redshifts can be estimated with well-understood error distributions. Tests of the algorithm on realistic mock SDSS catalogs suggest that the detected sample is ~85% complete and over 90% pure for clusters with masses above 1.0*10^{14} h^{-1} M_solar and redshifts up to z=0.45. The errors of estimated cluster redshifts from maximum likelihood method are shown to be small (typically less that 0.01) over the whole redshift range with photometric redshift errors typical of those found in the Sloan survey. Inside the spherical radius corresponding to a galaxy overdensity of Delta=200, we find the derived cluster richness Lambda_{200} a roughly linear indicator of its virial mass M_{200}, which well recovers the relation between total luminosity and cluster mass of the input simulation.Comment: Accepted to ApJ. 13 pages, 9 figure

Reionization Histories of Milky Way Mass Halos

We investigate the connection between the epoch of reionization and the present day universe, by examining the extended mass reionization histories of dark matter halos identified at z=0. We combine an N-body dark matter simulation of a 600 Mpc volume with a three-dimensional, seminumerical reionization model. This provides reionization redshifts for each particle, which can then be connected with the properties of their halos at the present time. We find that the vast majority of present-day halos with masses larger than ~ few x 10^11 Msun reionize earlier than the rest of the universe. We also find significant halo-to-halo diversity in mass reionization histories, and find that in realistic inhomogenous models, the material within a given halo is not expected to reionize at the same time. In particular, the scatter in reionization times within individual halos is typically larger than the scatter among halos. From our fiducial reionization model, we find that the typical 68% scatter in reionization times within halos is ~ 115 Myr for 10^(12 \pm 0.25) Msun halos, decreasing slightly to ~ 95 Myr for 10^(15 \pm 0.25) Msun halos. We find a mild correlation between reionization history and environment: halos with shorter reionization histories are typically in more clustered environments, with the strongest trend on a scale of ~ 20 Mpc. Material in Milky Way mass halos with short reionization histories is preferentially reionized in relatively large HII regions, implying reionization mostly by sources external to the progenitors of the present-day halo. We investigate the impact on our results of varying the reionization model parameters, which span a range of reionization scenarios with varying timing and morphology.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Submitted to Ap