Environmental Dependence of Properties of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By Changbom Park, Yun-Young Choi, Michael S. E. Vogeley, J. Richard Gott III, M. Blanton, for the Lsst Collaboration. 2006

264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the dependence of physical properties of galaxies brighter than Mr = -18.0 + 5 log h in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) on environment, as measured by local density using an adaptive smoothing kernel. We find that variations of galaxy properties with environment are almost entirely due to the dependence of morphology and luminosity on environment. Because galaxy properties depend not only on luminosity but also on morphology, it is clear that galaxy properties cannot be determined solely by dark halo mass. When morphology and luminosity are fixed, other physical properties, such as color, color gradient, concentration, size, velocity dispersion, and star formation rate, are nearly independent of local density, without any break or feature. The only feature is the sharp decrease of the late-type fraction above the critical luminosity of about Mr = -21.3 in the morphology versus luminosity relation. Weak residual dependences on environment include that of the color of late types (bluer at lower density) and of the L-σ relation of early types (larger dispersion at higher density for bright galaxies). The fraction of galaxies with early morphological type is a monotonically increasing function of local density and luminosity. The morphology-density-luminosity relation, as measured in this work, should be a key constraint on galaxy formation models. We demonstrate that the dependence on environment of the morphology of galaxies originates from variations in density on effective Gaussian smoothing scales much smaller than 12 h-1 Mpc. We find that galaxy morphology varies both with density measured on an effective Gaussian smoothing scale of 4.7 h-1 Mpc and with distance to the nearest bright galaxy, particularly when the distance is about 0.2 h-1 Mpc. We propose as a mechanism that the morphology of galaxies in galaxy systems is transformed by the tidal force.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/65837f9adccbf68daa3d27369d186340f129fe47

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Galaxy Zoo: Disentangling the Environmental Dependence of Morphology and Colour ⋆ (2008, methodology): “Automated methods for classifying galaxies using more structural information have also been recently developed (e.g., Conselice 2006, Park et al. 2007).”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – II. The effect of environment on interactions (2010, background): “…Geller 1984), the colours, morphologies and mean star formation rates of galaxies all clearly depend on their local environment (e.g Kauffmann et al. 2004; Balogh et al. 2004; Baldry et al. 2006; Weinmann et al. 2006; Park et al 2007; Skibba et al. 2009; Bamford et al. 2009 and references therein).”
Physical properties and environments of nearby galaxies (2009, background): “The larger scale density field appears to be much less important (Kauffmann et al. 2004; Blanton 2006; Park et al. 2007).”
Measures of Galaxy Environment I - What is "Environment"? (2011, methodology): “This weighting corresponds to the spline kernel of Monaghan & Lattanzio (1985) and is the standard kernel of SPH.1 This method was used with 20 neighbours in Park et al. (2007), but values of 32 and 64 are more common in SPH.”
Cosmic Voids in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (2011, background): “…to a picture in which star formation in void halos is suppressed, our analyses of void galaxies in the SDSS DR2 and DR4 samples indicate that void galaxies are bluer and have higher specific star formation rates than galaxies in denser environments (Rojas et al. 2004, 2005; Park et al. 2007).”
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.”
Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment (2008, background): “2003; Ball et al. 2004; Allen et al. 2006; Blakeslee et al. 2006; Conselice 2006; Ball et al. 2008; Park et al. 2007).”
SPECTROSCOPIC CONFIRMATION OF TWO MASSIVE RED-SEQUENCE-SELECTED GALAXY CLUSTERS AT z ∼ 1.2 IN THE SpARCS-NORTH CLUSTER SURVEY (2008, background): “…as star formation rate (SFR, e.g., Lewis et al. 2002; Gomez et al. 2003; Kauffmann et al. 2004), 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…”
Merger Histories of Galaxy Halos and Implications for Disk Survival (2007, methodology): “Given that galaxy morphology fractions are observed to change systematically as a function of luminosity or mass scale (e.g. Park et al. 2007), we are also interested in exploring merger fractions as a function of M0.”
Environmental effects on satellite galaxies: the link between concentration, size and colour profile (2008, background): “Also, it has been been found that galaxies in dense regions might have slightly decreased radii compared to their counterparts in less dense regions (Blanton et al. 2005a; Kauffmann et al. 2004; but see Park et al. 2007).”
MERGERS IN ΛCDM: UNCERTAINTIES IN THEORETICAL PREDICTIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MERGER RATE (2010, background): “…the fraction of blue satellites is lower than that observed, and the observed small-scale clustering of star-forming or blue galaxies tends to be poorly reproduced (see references above and Cooper et al. 2006, 2007; Park et al. 2007; Blanton & Berlind 2007; Li et al. 2006; Coil et al. 2008).”
Environment and self-regulation in galaxy formation (2009, background): “…(Tran et al. 2001; Goto et al. 2003; Helsdon & Ponman 2003; Kuehn & Ryden 2005; Sorrentino, Antonuccio-Delogu & Rifatto 2006; Holden et al. 2007; Park et al. 2007; van der Wel et al. 2007; Bamford et al. 2009) and intermediate redshift Universe (Dressler et al. 1997; Fasano et al. 2000; Treu et…”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – VI. The orbital extent of enhanced star formation in interacting galaxies (2013, background): “…some studies have probed enhanced star formation out to even larger separations, it is unclear if these enhancements are due to galaxy−galaxy interactions, larger scale environmental effects or sample biases (e.g., Sol Alonso et al. 2006; Park et al. 2007; Robaina et al. 2009; Robaina & Bell 2012).”
Galaxy Zoo: the fraction of merging galaxies in the SDSS and their morphologies (2009, background): “…of galaxies (White & Rees 1978; Lacey & Cole 1993; Conselice 2006a; De Lucia et al. 2006), environmental effects on morphology (Capak et al. 2007; Park et al. 2007; Ball et al. 2008; Van der Wel 2008) and the distribution of the dark matter that drives the merger process (Bond et al. 1991; Cole…”
There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes (2009, background): “These results led the authors to conclude that the frequency of mergers may present a substantial challenge to our understanding of disk galaxy stability, as the majority of galaxies in MWmass halos are disk-dominated (Weinmann et al. 2006; van den Bosch et al. 2007; Park et al. 2007)).”
A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies. II. Formation of Red Ellipticals (2007, result): “A similar result is found by Park et al. (2007) and Kauffmann et al. (2004).”