The Environmental Dependence of Galaxy Properties in the Local Universe: Dependences on Luminosity, Local Density, and System Richness

By Masayuki Tanaka, T. Goto, S. Okamura, K. Shimasaku, J. Brinkmann. 2004

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the environmental dependence of star formation and the morphology of galaxies in the local universe based on a volume-limited sample constructed from the data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The sample galaxies (19,714 in total) are restricted to the redshift range of 0.030 < z < 0.065 and the magnitude range of Mr < M + 2. We investigate correlations between star formation, morphology, luminosity, local density, and richness of galaxy systems. First, we focus on how galaxy properties change with local density. Galaxies in a dense environment are found to have suppressed star formation rates and early morphological types compared with those in the field. Star formation and morphology show a "break" at the critical local density of log Σcrit ∼ 0.4 galaxies h Mpc-2, which is in agreement with previous studies. However, the break can be seen only for faint galaxies (M + 1 < Mr < M + 2), and bright galaxies (Mr < M + 1) show no break. Thus, galaxies of different luminosities are found to show different environmental dependences. Next we examine dependences on richness of galaxy systems. Median properties of galaxies residing in systems with σ > 200 km s-1 show no dependence on system richness, and most of the galaxies in those systems are non–star-forming early-type galaxies. Star formation activities of galaxies are different from those of field galaxies even in systems as poor as σ ∼ 100 km s-1. This result suggests that environmental mechanisms that are effective only in rich systems, such as ram pressure stripping of cold gas and harassment, have not played a major role in transforming galaxies into red early-type galaxies. Strangulation and interactions between galaxies, however, remain candidates of the driver of the environmental dependence. In the dense environment in the local universe, the slow transformation of faint galaxies occurs to some extent, but the transformation of bright galaxies is not clearly visible. We suggest that the evolution of bright galaxies is not strongly related to galaxy system, such as groups and clusters, while the evolution of faint galaxies is likely to be closely connected to galaxy system.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2dc617e8c66b015f7b92c2ebc50b9fdc60edc2c8

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Citations in the corpus

Properties of galaxy groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – I. The dependence of colour, star formation and morphology on halo mass (2005, methodology): “…(significantly) with environment above a characteristic surface density, which is roughly consistent with the characteristic density at the perimeter of a cluster or group (Hashimoto & Oemler 1999; Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003; Goto et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004a; Tanaka et al. 2004).”
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).”
Internal and Collective Properties of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2006, background): “Nevertheless, parameters based on fiber spectra, such as line widths and those from the principal component analysis, are often used to characterize the star formation activity, morphological types, etc. (e.g. Tanaka et al. 2004; Balogh et al. 2004b).”
The importance of satellite quenching for the build-up of the red sequence of present-day galaxies (2007, background): “…that found that star formation quenching cannot be ascribed solely to processes that are significant only in rich clusters, such as ram-pressure stripping and galaxy harassment (e.g. Balogh et al. 2002; Tanaka et al. 2004; Cooper et al. 2007; Gerke et al. 2007; Verdugo, Ziegler & Gerken 2007).”
The Build-up of the Colour-Magnitude Relation (2005, methodology): “This implies that the evolutionary path of bright galaxies is different from that of faint galaxies in such a way that the evolution of faint galaxies is strongly related to groups and clusters, while that of bright galaxies is not strongly related (Tanaka et al. 2004).”
The Morphology-Density Relation in z ~ 1 Clusters (2005, methodology): “Tanaka et al. (2004) demonstrate that there is indeed a change in the MDR at z < 0:07 as a function of luminosity based on an analysis of 20,000 SDSS galaxies.”
Environmental Effects on Late‐Type Galaxies in Nearby Clusters (2006, background): “…PASP, 118:517–559 that star formation decreases above a characteristic galaxyprojected density of ∼1 Mpc 2, corresponding to 1–2 virial 2h75 radii (Gómez et al. 2003; Lewis et al. 2002; Tanaka et al. 2004; Nichol 2004), consistent with Figure 12 and the clustercentric distribution of H i (Fig.”
On the evolution and environmental dependence of the star formation rate versus stellar mass relation since z ∼ 2 (2013, background): “Goto et al. 2003), and there is a clear trend that the star formation activity of galaxies tends to be lower in high-density environment than low-density fields (e.g. Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al.2003; Tanaka et al. 2004; Balogh et al. 2004).”
Properties of galaxy groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – II. Active galactic nucleus feedback and star formation truncation (2006, unknown): “Note that some earlier work (e.g. Balogh et al. 2004b; Tanaka et al. 2004) has found no correlation between galaxy properties and halo velocity dispersion.”
The correlation of star formation quenching with internal galaxy properties and environment (2008, background): “Journal compilation C© 2009 RAS Kauffmann et al. 2004; Tanaka et al. 2004; Christlein & Zabludoff 2005; Poggianti et al. 2006).”
266 E+A galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 2: the origin of E+A galaxies (2005, background): “…morphology-density relation (e.g., Postman & Geller 1984; Dressler et al. 1997; Goto et al. 2003d; Goto et al. 2004a and see the references therein), and the correlation between star formation rate and the environment (e.g., Hashimoto et al. 1998; Tanaka et al. 2004 and see the references therein).”
Star formation and AGN activity in SDSS cluster galaxies (2009, background): “…similar masses (Moran et al. 2007), this scatter seems to be mostly stochastic in nature: several studies find that there is no systematic trend of varying galaxy populations with cluster mass, at least not for massive clusters (Tanaka et al. 2004; Baloghet al. 2004b; Goto 2005; Finn et al. 2008).”
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…”
Galaxy bimodality versus stellar mass and environment (2006, background): “There are many studies including Paper II to this paper (§ 1.1) that focus on the variation of galaxy properties with local density (Kauffmann et al. 2004; Tanaka et al. 2004; Kelm et al. 2005; Alonso et al. 2006; Haines et al. 2006; Mateus et al. 2006; Patiri et al. 2006).”
Protoclusters associated with z > 2 radio galaxies - I. Characteristics of high redshift protoclusters (2006, background): “Also because clusters are the most extreme overdense regions in the Universe, they allow an efficient investigation of the interaction between galaxies and their environment (e.g., Miles etal., 2004; Tanaka et al., 2004; van Zee et al., 2004; Goto, 2005; Nakata et al., 2005; Tran et al., 2005).”
Tracking the impact of environment on the galaxy stellar mass function up to z ~ 1 in the 10 k zCOSMOS sample (2009, background): “Tanaka et al. (2004) studied the environmental dependence of star formation and morphologies: they pointed out that environment is more eff ctive on faint galaxies, affecting more their star formation and morphology in dense regions above a critical density, whereas the properties of bright…”
The dependence of star formation activity on environment and stellar mass at z∼ 1 from the HiZELS-Hα survey (2010, background): “At the present epoch, star formation activity is strongly dependent on environment (e.g. Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003; Tanaka et al. 2004; Mahajan et al. 2010): while clusters of galaxies seem to be primarily populated by passively-evolving galaxies, star-forming galaxies are mainly found…”
CAIRNS: The Cluster and Infall Region Nearby Survey. I. Redshifts and Mass Profiles (2003, methodology): “We measure star formation rates from EW[Hα], similar to many other investigators (Carter et al. 2001; Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004; Mateus & Sodré 2004; Tanaka et al. 2004).”
The HIPASS catalogue: ΩH i and environmental effects on the H i mass function of galaxies (2005, background): “Kauffmann et al. (2004) and Tanaka et al. (2004) also find that the specific star formation rateSFR/M∗, is strongly dependent on environment, but furthermore conclude that this relation is most pronounced for the lower mass galaxies.”
Environmental Dependence of Properties of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2006, methodology): “Tanaka et al. (2004) reported that the star formation rate indicated by the g i color and the equivalent width of the H emission line is suppressed in dense environments.”