Cluster finding with outskirt stellar masses and percolation

Abstract

The abundance of galaxy clusters is a powerful cosmological probe, but optical cluster cosmology is limited by selection systematics, in particular the projection effects that affect cluster finders based on galaxy populations such as the red sequence. The outer stellar mass ($M_\mathrm{out}$) of cluster central galaxies -- e.g., the stellar mass in a 50-100 kpc annulus -- offers an alternative selection that relies only on the central galaxy and is therefore largely free from projection effects. Its primary systematic is instead satellite contamination, since massive clusters can host more than one galaxy with high outer stellar mass. Using the IllustrisTNG300 simulation at $z=0.4$, we quantify this contamination and investigate a simple, proximity-based percolation method to mitigate it, in which galaxies with lower outer stellar mass lying within a given radius of a more massive galaxy are removed from the sample. We find that the satellite fraction defined by the friends-of-friends (FoF) algorithm is modest even without percolation ($\leq 15\%$ for $M_\mathrm{out} > 10^{10}\,\mathrm{M}_\odot$ and $<10\%$ for $M_\mathrm{out} > 10^{11}\,\mathrm{M}_\odot$), and that percolation reduces it further, with the improvement increasing for percolation radii up to $3.0\,R_{200c}$. For a moderately high outer stellar mass cut ($\sim 4\times10^{10}\,\mathrm{M}_\odot$) and percolation radius ($\sim 2.0\,R_{200c}$), we recover a cluster sample that is both highly complete and pure for halo masses $\gtrsim 10^{14}\,\mathrm{M}_\odot$. These results indicate that outer stellar mass, combined with simple percolation, has the potential to provide a clean and readily calibratable selection of massive galaxy clusters.