The environmental dependence of galaxy clustering in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

A generic prediction of hierarchical clustering models is that the mass function of dark haloes in dense regions in the Universe should be top-heavy. We provide a novel test of this prediction using a sample of galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. To perform the test, we compare measurements of galaxy clustering in dense and underdense regions. We find that galaxies in dense regions cluster significantly more strongly than those in less dense regions. This is true over the entire 0.1–30 Mpc pair separation range for which we can make accurate measurements. We make similar measurements in realistic mock catalogs in which the only environmental effects are those which arise from the predicted correlation between halo mass and environment. We also provide an analytic halo-model based calculation of the effect. Both the mock catalogs and the analytic calculation provide rather good descriptions of the SDSS measurements. Thus, our results provide strong support for hierarchical models. They suggest that, unless care is taken to study galaxies at fixed mass, correlations between galaxy properties and the surrounding environment are almost entirely due to more fundamental correlations between galaxy properties and host halo mass, and between halo mass and environment.