Bulge mass is king: the dominant role of the bulge in determining the fraction of passive galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By A. Bluck, J. Trevor Mendel, Sara L. Ellison, J. Moreno, L. Simard, David R. Patton, E. Starkenburg. 2014

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the origin of galaxy bimodality by quantifying the relative role of intrinsic and environmental drivers to the cessation (or `quenching') of star formation in over half a million local Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxies. Our sample contains a wide variety of galaxies at z=0.02-0.2, with stellar masses of 8 < log(M*/M_sun) < 12, spanning the entire morphological range from pure disks to spheroids, and over four orders of magnitude in local galaxy density and halo mass. We utilise published star formation rates and add to this recent GIM2D photometric and stellar mass bulge + disk decompositions from our group. We find that the passive fraction of galaxies increases steeply with stellar mass, halo mass, and bulge mass, with a less steep dependence on local galaxy density and bulge-to-total stellar mass ratio (B/T). At fixed internal properties, we find that central and satellite galaxies have different passive fraction relationships. For centrals, we conclude that there is less variation in the passive fraction at a fixed bulge mass, than for any other variable, including total stellar mass, halo mass, and B/T. This implies that the quenching mechanism must be most tightly coupled to the bulge. We argue that radio-mode AGN feedback offers the most plausible explanation of the observed trends.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aaa0992a3316b100aff5733946add9fb0880c3f5

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Citations in the corpus

Evolution of density profiles in high-z galaxies: compaction and quenching inside-out (2015, unknown): “…2003; Franx et al. 2008; Robaina et al. 2012; Mendel et al. 2013; Cibinel et al. 2013a; Fang et al. 2013; Schawinski et al. 2014; Omand et al. 2014; Bluck et al. 2014; Woo et al. 2015) and at high-z (Wuyts et al. 2011, 2012; Bell et al. 2012; Cheung et al. 2012; Szomoru et al. 2012; Barro et al.…”
The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Constraints on Supermassive Black Hole Binaries from the Gravitational-wave Background (2023, background): “A fraction of the galaxy stellar mass is in the stellar bulge component (Mbulge= få,bulge ·må), which we take to be få,bulge= 0.615 based on empirical bulge fraction measurements of massive galaxies from Lang et al. (2014) and Bluck et al. (2014).”
The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation (2016, methodology): “We have compared our simulated galaxies to distributions of bulgeto-total ratios, Krajnović et al. (2013) for early-type galaxies and Gadotti (2009) for disc galaxies, and Bluck et al. (2014) for a morphological mix.”
BULGE GROWTH AND QUENCHING SINCE z = 2.5 IN CANDELS/3D-HST (2014, background): “…Cheung et al. 2012 for intermediate redshifts z < 0.8) Importantly, the same behavior explored here over the redshift range 0.5 < z < 2.5 extends in a strikingly similar fashion all the way to the present day, as demonstrated by Bluck et al. (2014) who exploit the large number statistics of SDSS.”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “Recent works have shown that the correlation between quiescence and other internal properties such as spheroid fraction, velocity dispersion, and central density is even stronger than that with stellar mass (Bell et al. 2012, Bluck et al. 2014, Cheung et al. 2012, Lang et al. 2014).”