Exploring the 2MASS Extended and Point Source Catalogs with Clustering Redshifts

Understand

The Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) has mapped out the low-redshift Universe down to $K_S\sim14$ mag.

• As its near-infrared photometry primarily probes the featureless Rayleigh-Jeans tail of galaxy spectral energy distributions, colour-based redshift estimation is rather uninformative.
• Until now, redshift estimates for this dataset have relied on optical follow-up suffering from selection biases.
• Here we use the newly-developed technique of clustering-based redshift estimation to infer the redshift distribution of the 2MASS sources regardless of their optical properties.