The evolution of Luminous Red Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
  7th data release
  We present a comprehensive study of the evolution of Luminous Red Galaxies
(LRGs) in the latest and final spectroscopic data release of the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey. We test the scenario of passive evolution of LRGs in 0.15<z<0.5, by
looking at the evolution of the number and luminosity density of LRGs, as well
as of their clustering. A new weighting scheme is introduced that allows us to
keep a large number of galaxies in our sample and put stringent constraints on
the growth and merging allowed by the data as a function of galaxy luminosity.
Introducing additional luminosity-dependent weighting for our clustering
analysis allows us to additionally constrain the nature of the mergers. We find
that, in the redshift range probed, the population of LRGs grows in luminosity
by 1.5-6 % Gyr^-1 depending on their luminosity. This growth is predominantly
happening in objects that reside in the lowest-mass haloes probed by this
study, and cannot be explained by satellite accretion into massive LRGs, nor by
LRG-LRG merging. We find that the evolution of the brightest objects (with a
K+e-corrected M_r,0.1 < -22.8) is consistent with that expected from passive
evolution.
