THE 2.4 M GALAXY LUMINOSITY FUNCTION AS MEASURED USING WISE. III. MEASUREMENT RESULTS

The WISE satellite surveyed the entire sky multiple times in four infrared wavelengths (3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 m; Wright et al. 2010). The unprecedented combination of coverage area and depth gives us the opportunity to measure the luminosity function of galaxies, one of the fundamental quantities in the study of them, at 2:4 m to an unparalleledlevel of formal statistical accuracy in the near infrared. The big advantage of measuring luminosity functions at wavelengths in the window 2 to 3:5 m is that it correlates more closely to the total stellar mass in galaxies than others. In this paper we report on the parameters for the 2:4 m luminosity function of galaxies obtained from applying the spectroluminosity functional based methods dened in Lake et al. (2017) to the data sets described in Lake et al. (2018) using the mean and covariance of 2:4 m normalized spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from Lake & Wright (2016). In terms of single Schechter function parameters evaluated at the present epoch, the combinedresult is: ? = 5:8 [0:3stat; 0:4sys] 10􀀀3 Mpc􀀀3, L? = 6:4 [0:1stat; 0:3sys] 1010 L2:4 m (M? = 􀀀21:67 [0:02stat; 0:05sys]AB mag), and = 􀀀1:050 [0:004stat; 0:04sys]. The high statistical accuracy comes from combining public redshift surveys with the wide coverage from WISE, and the unevenness in statistical accuracy is a result of our efforts to work around biases of uncertain origin that affect resolved and marginally resolved galaxies. With furtherrefinements, the techniques applied in this work promise to advance the study of the spectral energy distribution of the universe.