The Massive End of the Stellar Mass Function

Understand

We derive average flux corrections to the \texttt{Model} magnitudes of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxies by stacking together mosaics of similar galaxies in bins of stellar mass and concentration.

• Extra flux is detected in the outer low surface brightness part of the galaxies, leading to corrections ranging from 0.05 to 0.32 mag for the highest stellar mass galaxies.
• We apply these corrections to the MPA-JHU (Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics - John Hopkins University) stellar masses for a complete sample of half a million galaxies from the SDSS survey to derive a corrected galaxy stellar mass function at $z=0.1$ in the stellar mass range $9.5<\log(M_\ast/M_\odot)<12.0$.
• We find that the flux corrections and the use of the MPA-JHU stellar masses have a significant impact on the massive end of the stellar mass function, making the slope significantly shallower than that estimated by Li \& White (2009), but steeper than derived by Bernardi et al.