The Bimodal Galaxy Color Distribution: Dependence on Luminosity and Environment

By M. Balogh, I. Baldry, Robert Nichol, C. J. Miller, Richard G. Bower, Karl Glazebrook. 2004

523 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze the u - r color distribution of 24,346 galaxies with Mr ≤ -18 and z < 0.08, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey first data release, as a function of luminosity and environment. The color distribution is well fitted with two Gaussian distributions, which we use to divide the sample into a blue and red population. At fixed luminosity, the mean color of the blue (red) distribution is nearly independent of environment, with a weakly significant (~3 σ) detection of a trend for colors to become redder by 0.1-0.14 (0.03-0.06) mag with a factor of ~100 increase in local density, as characterized by the surface density of galaxies within a ±1000 km s-1 redshift slice. In contrast, at fixed luminosity the fraction of galaxies in the red distribution is a strong function of local density, increasing from ~10%-30% of the population in the lowest density environments to ~70% at the highest densities. The strength of this trend is similar for both the brightest (-23 < Mr < -22) and faintest (-19 < Mr < -18) galaxies in our sample. The fraction of red galaxies within the virialized regions of clusters shows no significant dependence on velocity dispersion. Even at the lowest densities explored, a substantial population of red galaxies exists, which might be fossil groups. We propose that most star-forming galaxies today evolve at a rate that is determined primarily by their intrinsic properties and independent of their environment. Any environmentally triggered transformations from blue to red colors must occur either on a short timescale or preferentially at high redshift to preserve the simple Gaussian nature of the color distribution. The mechanism must be effective for both bright and faint galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1194620ad04c7cf27af01404ee4d8e91792a2c3c

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Citations in the corpus

Semianalytical Model of Galaxy Formation with High-Resolution N-Body Simulations (2004, background): “Baldry et al. (2004a) and Balogh et al. (2004) have shown that the color bimodality also depends on the environment defined by the local density of galaxies.”
Semi-empirical analysis of Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies – II. The bimodality of the galaxy population revisited (2005, methodology): “This issue was addressed by Balogh et al. (2004) who have complemented the analysis by Baldry et al. (2004) to account for, besides luminosity dependences, the environmental dependence of the red and blue galaxy fractions.”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “A number of studies have shown that the probability for a galaxy to be quiescent depends on both its stellar mass and large-scale environment or halo mass (Balogh et al. 2004, Hogg et al. 2004, Peng et al. 2010, Woo et al. 2013).”
THE RISE AND FALL OF PASSIVE DISK GALAXIES: MORPHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION ALONG THE RED SEQUENCE REVEALED BY COSMOS (2009, background): “…the local population both in terms of morphology and star formation as a function of what appears to be the best observationally accessible variable for separating the two populations, the galaxy’s stellar mass (M∗; Bell et al. 2003; Kauffmann et al. 2003; Baldry et al. 2004; Balogh et al. 2004).”
What Aspects of Galaxy Environment Matter? (2006, methodology): “In other cases, we have used field samples and measured the number of nearby galaxies relative to the mean density, using various measures (Hashimoto et al. 1998; Hashimoto & Oemler 1999; Balogh et al. 2004a; Hogg et al. 2004; Kauffmann et al. 2004; Blanton et al. 2005a).”
SPECTROSCOPIC CONFIRMATION OF TWO MASSIVE RED-SEQUENCE-SELECTED GALAXY CLUSTERS AT z ∼ 1.2 IN THE SpARCS-NORTH CLUSTER SURVEY (2008, background): “…morphology (e.g., Dressler 1980; Goto et al. 2003; Park et al. 2007), stellar mass (e.g., Kauffmann et al. 2004), color (e.g., Hogg et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004; Blanton et al. 2005), and luminosity (e.g., Croton et al. 2005; Park et al. 2007) are all strongly correlated with local galaxy…”
Dependence of galaxy quenching on halo mass and distance from its centre (2012, background): “The decreased quenching with D also agrees with several other studies of SFR or the blue/red fractions within groups and clusters (Gómez et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004; Tanaka et al. 2004; Rines et al. 2005; Haines et al. 2007; Wolf et al. 2009; von der Linden et al. 2010).”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – II. The effect of environment on interactions (2010, background): “High density environments become systematically more dominated by masssive red galaxies (Kauffmann et al. 2004; Balogh et al. 2004; Baldry et al. 2006) and galaxy-galaxy interactions therein become more dominated by ‘dry’ mergers (Linet al. 2010).”
Galaxy Luminosity Functions to z~1 from DEEP2 and COMBO-17: Implications for Red Galaxy Formation (2005, background): “The incidence of spheroid-dominated galaxies is also higher in groups and clusters of galaxies (e.g., Dressler 1980, Postman & Geller 1984, Hogg et al. 2003, Balogh et al. 2004, Baldry et al. 2004), where mergers were more frequent.”
The accretion of galaxies into groups and clusters (2009, background): “In particular, galaxy groups and clusters have lower average galaxy star formation rates (Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003), lower fractions of disc galaxies (Dressler et al. 1997; McGee et al. 2008) and higher red fractions (Balogh et al. 2004; Weinmann et al. 2006) than field galaxies.”
The DEEP2 galaxy redshift survey: evolution of the colour–density relation at 0.4 < z < 1.35 (2006, background): “…that the connections between local environment and galaxy properties such as morphology, color, and luminosity extend over the full range of densities, from rich clusters to voids (e.g., Kauffmann et al. 2004; Balogh et al. 2004a; Blanton et al. 2005; Croton et al. 2005; Rojas et al. 2005).”
Properties of galaxy groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – I. The dependence of colour, star formation and morphology on halo mass (2005, background): “Balogh et al. (2004b) studied the fraction of red galaxies as function of the projected density, 5, and cluster velocity dispersion.”
THE SLOAN LENS ACS SURVEY. X. STELLAR, DYNAMICAL, AND TOTAL MASS CORRELATIONS OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, background): “For example, the several bi-modal classes of galaxies (e.g., red/blue color, early/late-type morphology; Balogh et al. 2004), the so- 1 Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA 2 Packard Fellow 3 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah, Salt Lake…”
THE GALAXY CONTENT OF SDSS CLUSTERS AND GROUPS (2007, background): “However, others (Balogh et al. 2004b; De Propris et al. 2004; Tanaka et al. 2004) found that the type fraction does not depend on cluster velocity dispersion, although Weinmann et al. (2006a) argues that this result may be due to the large scatter in relationship between velocity dispersion and…”
The K20 survey. VII. The spectroscopic catalogue: spectral properties and evolution of the galaxy population ⋆, ⋆⋆ (2005, background): “This property, already seen both in the observed color distribution (Balogh et al. 2004; Bell et al. 2004) and in the intrinsic color indices (Kauffmann et al. 2003), is a manifestation of underlying blue and red galaxy populations.”
3D-HST: A WIDE-FIELD GRISM SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY WITH THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE (2012, background): “However, at low redshift most massive galaxies are quiescent regardless of environment (Kauffmann et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004), so it is difficult to determine whether the environment provides a physical mechanism that alters the galaxies (e.g., through gas stripping), or whether dense…”
Environmental Effects on Late‐Type Galaxies in Nearby Clusters (2006, background): “They confirm the increase in the fraction of red, bulge-dominated galaxies with galaxy density and clustercentric distance (Goto et al. 2003a; Hogg et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004; De Propris et al. 2004) that was known to exist in rich, nearby clusters.”
Bulge mass is king: the dominant role of the bulge in determining the fraction of passive galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2014, background): “Satellite galaxies are expected to have additional quenching mechanisms applicable to them than central galaxies, due to the extra physics associated with motion relative to the hot gas halo (e.g. Balogh et al. 2004, van den Bosch et al. 2008).”