title: Galaxy-Dark Matter Connection : Insights from Satellite Kinematics
creator: More, Surhud Shrikant
subject: 520
subject: 520 Astronomy and allied sciences
description: A thorough knowledge of the connection between the mass of dark matter haloes and the properties of their central galaxies is crucial to understand the physics of galaxy formation. The kinematics of satellite galaxies is an excellent technique to measure the dark matter halo masses. However, the kinematics can be measured with high signal-to-noise only by stacking the signal around central galaxies with similar properties, which results in various systematic biases and complicates the interpretation of the signal. This thesis presents an analytical framework that accounts for systematic biases and selection effects and aids in the interpretation of the kinematics of satellite galaxies. A new method is established to obtain the average scaling relations between halo mass and central galaxy properties, and the scatter in these relations simultaneously. After a thorough testing of this method using a realistic mock galaxy catalogue, it is applied to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to extract the halo mass-luminosity and halo mass-stellar mass relationship of central galaxies and their scatter. Comparisons with other probes of these scaling relations, such as galaxy-galaxy lensing, show good agreement which implies that these scaling relations are well established and supported by various astrophysical probes. Physical insights about these scaling relations, in particular their scatter, gained by the analysis of a semi-analytical model for galaxy formation are also presented. Finally, the inferred scaling relations crucially depend on the transparency of the Universe. By performing a test of the “Etherington relation” between the distances measured by standard rulers and by standard candles, a quantitative measure of the cosmic transparency, which is relatively free from astrophysical assumptions, is obtained.
date: 2009
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/9694/1/thesis.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00009694
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus-96942
identifier:   More, Surhud Shrikant  (2009) Galaxy-Dark Matter Connection : Insights from Satellite Kinematics.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/9694/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng