• DOI:10.1086/323717
• Corpus ID: 31147378

Spectroscopic Target Selection for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Luminous Red Galaxy Sample

@article{Eisenstein2001SpectroscopicTS,
  title={Spectroscopic Target Selection for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Luminous Red Galaxy Sample},
  author={Daniel J. Eisenstein and James T. Annis and James E. Gunn and Alexander S. Szalay and Andrew J. Connolly and Robert C. Nichol and Neta A. Bahcall and Mariangela Bernardi and Scott M. Burles and Francisco Javier Castander and Masataka Fukugita and David W. Hogg and Željko Ivezi{\'c} and Gillian R. Knapp and Robert H. Lupton and Vijay K. Narayanan and Marc Postman and Daniel E. Reichart and Michael Richmond and Donald P. Schneider and David J. Schlegel and Michael A. Strauss and Mark SubbaRao and Douglas L. Tucker and Daniel E. vanden Berk and Michael S. E. Vogeley and David H. Weinberg and Brian Yanny},
  journal={The Astronomical Journal},
  year={2001},
  volume={122},
  pages={2267 - 2280}
}

• D. Eisenstein, J. Annis, +25 authors B. Yanny
• Published 9 August 2001
• Physics
• The Astronomical Journal

We describe the target selection and resulting properties of a spectroscopic sample of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from the imaging data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). These galaxies are selected on the basis of color and magnitude to yield a sample of luminous intrinsically red galaxies that extends fainter and farther than the main flux-limited portion of the SDSS galaxy spectroscopic sample. The sample is designed to impose a passively evolving luminosity and rest-frame color cut to a redshift of 0.38. Additional, yet more luminous red galaxies are included to a redshift of ∼0.5. Approximately 12 of these galaxies per square degree are targeted for spectroscopy, so the sample will number over 100,000 with the full survey. SDSS commissioning data indicate that the algorithm efficiently selects luminous (M ≈ -21.4) red galaxies, that the spectroscopic success rate is very high, and that the resulting set of galaxies is approximately volume limited out to z = 0.38. When the SDSS is complete, the LRG spectroscopic sample will fill over 1 h-3 Gpc3 with an approximately homogeneous population of galaxies and will therefore be well suited to studies of large-scale structure and clusters out to z = 0.5.