galics – V: Low‐ and high‐order clustering in mock Sloan Digital Sky Surveys

We use the galics hybrid model of galaxy formation to explore the nature of galaxy clustering in the local Universe. We bring the theoretical predictions of our model into the observational plane using the momaf software to build mock catalogues which mimic Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) observations. We measure low‐ and high‐order angular clustering statistic from these mock catalogues, after selecting galaxies the same way as for observations, and compare them directly to estimates from the SDSS data. Note that we also present the first measurements of high‐order statistics on the SDSS DR1. We find that our model is in general good agreement with observations in the scale/luminosity range where we can trust the predictions. This range is found to be limited (i) by the size of the dark matter simulation used – which introduces finite volume effects at large scales – and by the mass resolution of this simulation – which introduces incompleteness at apparent magnitudes fainter than r ∼ 20 . We then focus on the small‐scale clustering properties of galaxies and investigate the behaviour of three different prescriptions for positioning galaxies within haloes of dark matter. We show that galaxies are poor tracers of either DM particles or DM substructures, within groups and clusters. Instead, SDSS data tells us that the distribution of galaxies lies somewhat in between these two populations. This confirms the general theoretical expectation from numerical simulations and semi‐analytic modelling.