A Self-Calibrating Halo-Based Galaxy Group Finder: Algorithm and Tests

Understand

We describe an extension of the halo-based galaxy group-finding algorithm.

• We add freedom to the algorithm in order to more accurately determine which galaxies are central and which are satellites, and to provide unbiased estimates of halo masses.
• We focus on determination of the galaxy-halo relations for star-forming and quiescent galaxies.
• The added freedom in the group-finding algorithm is self-calibrated using observations of color-dependent galaxy clustering, as well as measurements of the total satellite luminosity in deep imaging data around stacked samples of spectroscopic central galaxies, L_sat.