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The Angular Clustering of Galaxy Pairs

Leopoldo Infante, Michael A. Strauss, Neta A. Bahcall, Gillian R. Knapp, Robert H. Lupton, Rita S. J. Kim, Michael S. Vogeley, J. Brinkmann, Istvan Csabai, Masataka Fukugita, Gregory Hennessy, Zeljko Ivezic, Don Q. Lamb, Brian C. Lee, Jeffrey R. Pier, D. G. York

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/0111019

Abstract

We identify close pairs of galaxies from 278 deg2 of Sloan Digital Sky Survey commissioning imaging data. The pairs are drawn from a sample of 330,041 galaxies with 18 < r* < 20. We determine the angular correlation function of galaxy pairs, and find it to be stronger than the correlation function of single galaxies by a factor of 2.9 +/- 0.4. The two correlation functions have the same logarithmic slope of 0.77. We invert Limber's equation to estimate the three-dimensional correlation functions; we find clustering lengths of r0= 4.2 +/- 0.4 h-1 Mpc for galaxies and 7.8 +/- 0.7 h-1 Mpc for galaxy pairs. These results agree well with the global richness dependence of the correlation functions of galaxy systems.

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