Environmental effects on satellite galaxies: the link between concentration, size and colour profile

By Simone M. Weinmann, G. Kauffmann, F. V. D. Bosch, A. Pasquali, D. H. Mcintosh, H. Mo, Xiaohu Yang, Yicheng Guo. 2008

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 4 group catalogue of Yang et al., we investigate sizes, concentrations, colour gradients and surface brightness profiles of central and satellite galaxies. We compare central and satellite galaxies at fixed stellar mass, in order to disentangle environmental from stellar mass dependencies. Early-and late-type galaxies are defined according to concentration. We find that at fixed stellar mass, late-type satellite galaxies have smaller radii and larger concentrations than late-type central galaxies. No such differences are found for early-type galaxies. We have also constructed surface brightness and colour profiles for the central and satellite galaxies in our sample. We find that late-type satellite galaxies have a lower surface brightness and redder colours than late-type central galaxies. We show that all observed differences between satellite and central galaxies can be explained by a simple fading model, in which the star formation in the disc decreases over time-scales of 2-3 Gyr after a galaxy becomes a satellite. Processes that induce strong morphological changes (e. g. harassment) and processes that strip the galaxy of its entire interstellar medium need not to be invoked in order to explain the environmental dependencies we find.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b51ac34b9e6c7caecb36c0c346cb1fb5baa5535

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Citations in the corpus

Are Brightest Halo Galaxies Central Galaxies (2010, methodology): “It has been suggested that this over-quenching problem can be avoided by adopting a longer time-scale for strangulation (e.g., Kang & van den Bosch 2008; Font et al. 2008; Weinmann et al. 2009).”
What determines satellite galaxy disruption (2009, background): “Zehavi et al. (2005) and Zheng et al. (2007) satellite fractions were both derived from fitting HODs to the number density and spatial clustering of galaxy samples from SDSS, though they used different HOD parametrizations.”
xCOLD GASS: The Complete IRAM 30 m Legacy Survey of Molecular Gas for Galaxy Evolution Studies (2017, background): “The concentration index can be regarded as a proxy for the bulge-to-disc ratio (Weinmann et al. 2009), with C > 2.5 being bulgedominated galaxies.”
ON THE DEARTH OF COMPACT, MASSIVE, RED SEQUENCE GALAXIES IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2009, unknown): “That said, we note that several studies (e.g. Kauffmann et al. 2004; Park et al. 2007; Weinmann et al. 2009) have found little or no evidence for an environmental dependence of the size–mass relation within SDSS.”
Star formation and AGN activity in SDSS cluster galaxies (2009, background): “There is increasing evidence (e.g. Weinmann et al. 2006, 2009; c© 2009 RAS van den Bosch et al. 2008a,b) thatstrangulation, the stripping of a diffuse gas reservoir surrounding the galaxy (Larson et al. 1980), is the most important of these processes.”
The GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey I: gas fraction scaling relations of massive galaxies and first data release (2009, methodology): “As shown in Figure 1 of Weinmann et al. (2009), there is a tight and well-defined correlation between the concentration index and the bulge-to-total ratio derived from full 2-dimensional multi-component fits using the methods presented in Gadotti (2009).”
THE IMPACT OF INTERACTIONS, BARS, BULGES, AND ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI ON STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY IN LOCAL MASSIVE GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “It has been shown to correlate well with bulge-to-total ratios as determined by two-dimensional bulge/disk decompositions (Weinmann et al. 2009).”
The DEEP3 Galaxy Redshift Survey: the impact of environment on the size evolution of massive early-type galaxies at intermediate redshift (2011, background): “…a less extreme subdivision of the environment distribution, Guo et al. (2009) also find no significant evidence for a correlation between local environment and the size or Sérsic index within the local early-type population (see also Weinmann et al. 2009; Nair, van den Bergh & Abraham 2010).”
MERGERS IN ΛCDM: UNCERTAINTIES IN THEORETICAL PREDICTIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MERGER RATE (2010, background): “…find that, if any stripping occurs, it often only does so in the central, most dense and high-pressure regions of massive halos (Weinmann et al. 2006a,b; Wang et al. 2007; Yang et al. 2009; Weinmann et al. 2009a; van den Bosch et al. 2008; Kang & van den Bosch 2008; McCarthy et al. 2008).”
Simulations of the galaxy population constrained by observations from z = 3 to the present day: implications for galactic winds and the fate of their ejecta (2012, result): “Nevertheless, they do note that the disagreement between star formation properties in the models and those observed is considerably worse for satellites than for centrals, as already shown clearly by earlier work (Weinmann et al. 2009; Wang et al. 2012).”
The dark side of galaxy colour (2013, background): “…tend to occupy more dense environments, and conversely, bluer galaxies (younger with active ongoing star formation) preferentially reside in underdense regions (Balogh et al. 1999; Blanton et al. 2005; Weinmann et al. 2006, 2009; Peng et al. 2010, 2012; Wetzel et al. 2011; Carollo et al. 2012).”
COLD GASS, an IRAM legacy survey of molecular gas in massive galaxies – I. Relations between H2, H i, stellar content and structural properties (2011, methodology): “We note that this critical value of concentration index (C = 2.6) corresponds to the observed transition between late- and early-type galaxies (e.g. Shimasaku et al. 2001; Nakamura et al. 2003; Weinmann et al. 2009).”
A fundamental problem in our understanding of low-mass galaxy evolution (2012, background): “(i) seems an unlikely explanation, as the contamination of the central sample by satellites is estimated to be only around 3 % (Weinmann et al. 2009).”
The ATLAS3D project - XIII. Mass and morphology of H I in early-type galaxies as a function of environment (2011, methodology): “This index is proxy for the bulge-to-disc ratio of a galaxy (e.g. Weinmann et al. 2009), so that it is often used to select samples of early- or late-type systems.”
The environmental history of group and cluster galaxies in a Λ cold dark matter universe (2011, background): “Several other studies have argued for relatively long timescales for the suppression of the star formation rates in satellite galaxies (Finn et al. 2008; Weinmann et al. 2009; De Lucia et al. 2009; Simard et al. 2009; von der Linden et al. 2010; McGee et al. 2011).”
MASS AND ENVIRONMENT AS DRIVERS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION. II. THE QUENCHING OF SATELLITE GALAXIES AS THE ORIGIN OF ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS (2011, background): “More detailed discussion about the completeness and contamination of the satellite and central can be found in Weinmann et al (2009).”
OVERVIEW OF THE SDSS-IV MaNGA SURVEY: MAPPING NEARBY GALAXIES AT APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY (2014, background): “Studies of satellite quenching in groupscale halos suggest processes that occur over 1–3 Gyr timescales (e.g., Weinmann et al. 2009; Lackner & Gunn 2012), but MaNGA will also capture a valuable sample of rare, but more dramatic, phenomena, including tidal stripping in action.”