CFHTlens: The environmental dependence of galaxy halo masses from weak lensing

Abstract

We use weak gravitational lensing to analyse the dark matter haloes around satellite galaxies in galaxy groups in the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) data set. This data set is derived from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey Wide survey, and encompasses 154 deg2 of high-quality shape data. Using the photometric redshifts, we divide the sample of lens galaxies with stellar masses in the range 109-1010.5M⊙ into those likely to lie in high-density environments (HDE) and those likely to lie in low-density environments (LDE). Through comparison with galaxy catalogues extracted from the Millennium Simulation, we show that the sample of HDE galaxies should primarily (~61 per cent) consist of satellite galaxies in groups, while the sample of LDE galaxies should consist of mostly (~87 per cent) non-satellite (field and central) galaxies. Comparing the lensing signals around samples of HDE and LDE galaxies matched in stellar mass, the lensing signal around HDE galaxies clearly shows a positive contribution from their host groups on their lensing signals at radii of ~500-1000 kpc, the typical separation between satellites and group centres. More importantly, the subhaloes of HDE galaxies are less massive than those around LDE galaxies by a factor of 0.65 ± 0.12, significant at the 2.9σ level. A natural explanation is that the haloes of satellite galaxies are stripped through tidal effects in the group environment. Our results are consistent with a typical tidal truncation radius of ~40 kpc. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.