Probing the galaxy-halo connection with total satellite luminosity

Abstract

We demonstrate how the total luminosity in satellite galaxies is a powerful probe of dark matter halos around central galaxies. The method cross-correlates central galaxies in spectroscopic galaxy samples with fainter galaxies detected in photometric surveys. After background subtraction, the excess galaxies around the central galaxies represent faint satellite galaxies within the dark matter halo. Using abundance matching models, we show that the the total galaxy luminosity, L_sat, scales linearly with host halo mass, making L_sat an excellent proxy for M_h. L_sat is also sensitive to the formation time of the halo, as younger halos have more substructure at fixed M_h. We demonstrate that probes of galaxy large-scale environment can break this degeneracy. Although this is an indirect probe of the halo, it can yield a high-S/N measurement for galaxies expected to occupy halos at $<10^{12}$ M_sol, where other methods suffer from larger errors. In this paper we focus on observational and theoretical systematics in the L_sat method. We test the robustness of our method of finding central galaxies and our methods of estimating the number of background galaxies. We implement this method on central galaxies in SDSS data, with satellites identified in faint imaging from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys. We find excellent agreement between our theoretical predictions and the observational measurements. Finally, we compare our L_sat measurements to weak lensing estimates of M_h for red and blue subsamples. In the stellar mass range where the measurements overlap, we find consistent results, where red galaxies live in larger halos. However, the L_sat approach allows us to probe significantly lower mass galaxies. At these masses, the L_sat values are equivalent. This example shows the potential of L_sat as a probe of dark halos. (Abridged)