The importance of satellite quenching for the build-up of the red sequence of present-day galaxies

By F. V. D. Bosch, Daniel Aquino, Xiaohu Yang, H. Mo, A. Pasquali, D. H. Mcintosh, Simone M. Weinmann, X. Kang. 2007

362 citations recorded by the source corpus.

According to the current paradigm, galaxies initially form as disc galaxies at the centres of their own dark matter haloes. During their subsequent evolution, they may undergo a transformation to a red, early-type galaxy, thus giving rise to the build-up of the red sequence. Two important, outstanding questions are (i) which transformation mechanisms are most important and (ii) in what environment do they occur. In this paper, we study the impact of transformation mechanisms that operate only on satellite galaxies, such as strangulation, ram-pressure stripping and galaxy harassment. Using a large galaxy group catalogue constructed from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we compare the colours and concentrations of satellites galaxies to those of central galaxies of the same stellar mass, adopting the hypothesis that the latter are the progenitors of the former. On average, satellite galaxies are redder and more concentrated than central galaxies of the same stellar mass, indicating that satellite-specific transformation processes do indeed operate. Central-satellite pairs that are matched in both stellar mass and colour, however, show no average concentration difference, indicating that the transformation mechanisms operating on satellites affect colour more than morphology. We also find that the colour and concentration differences of matched central-satellite pairs are completely independent of the mass of the host halo (not to be confused with the subhalo) of the satellite galaxy, indicating that satellite-specific transformation mechanisms are equally efficient in host haloes of all masses. This strongly rules against mechanisms that are thought to operate only in very massive haloes, such as ram-pressure stripping or harassment. Instead, we argue that strangulation is the main transformation mechanism for satellite galaxies. Finally, we determine the relative importance of satellite quenching for the build-up of the red sequence. We find that roughly 70 per cent of red-sequence satellite galaxies with M(*) similar to 10(9) h(-2) M(circle dot) had their star formation quenched as satellites. This drops rapidly with increasing stellar mass, reaching virtually zero at M* similar to 10(11)h(-2)M(circle dot). Therefore, a very significant fraction of red satellite galaxies were already quenched before they became a satellite.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b04015d65044c625a474b60e55e66d9a752e0c00

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Citations in the corpus

Galaxy Groups in the SDSS DR4. II. Halo Occupation Statistics (2007, methodology): “…the average number of galaxies with luminosity L dL/2 that reside in a halo of massM, has also been extensively investigated (Yang et al. 2003; van den Bosch et al. 2003b, 2007; Vale & Ostriker 2004, 2006; Cooray 2006) and has been applied to various redshift surveys, such as the 2dFGRS, the Sloan…”
Tracking the impact of environment on the galaxy stellar mass function up to z ~ 1 in the 10 k zCOSMOS sample (2009, methodology): “Recently, van den Bosch et al. (2008) investigated the efficiency of transformation processes, using a group catalogue drawn from the SDSS: the colour and the concentration of a satellite galaxy are almost completely d - termined by their stellar mass, with only a very mild dependence on…”
Galaxy evolution in groups and clusters: satellite star formation histories and quenching time-scales in a hierarchical Universe (2012, methodology): “…≈ 0 (e.g., Balogh et al. 2000; Ellingson et al. 2001; De Propris et al. 2004; Weinmann et al. 2006; Blanton & Berlind 2007; Kimm et al. 2009; van den Bosch et al. 2008; Hansen et al. 2009; Kimm et al. 2009; Pasquali et al. 2009; von der Linden et al. 2010; Prescott et al. 2011; Peng et al. 2012;…”
The many manifestations of downsizing: hierarchical galaxy formation models confront observations (2009, background): “…discrepancy could be due to the overquenching problem for satellite galaxies (Weinmann et al. 2006; Gilbank & Balogh 2008; Kimm et al. 2008; van den Bosch et al. 2008), which is caused by the assumption in all three SAMs that the hot halo is instantly stripped from satellites as they enter a…”
The dark side of galaxy colour (2013, background): “…color with zacc regardless of host halo mass, the success of our implementation of age distribution matching provides new supporting evidence for conclusions drawn in van den Bosch et al. (2008), who found that satellite-specific processes are equally efficient in host halos of all masses.”
A STELLAR MASS THRESHOLD FOR QUENCHING OF FIELD GALAXIES (2012, background): “Luminous red galaxies exist both in the field and denser regions, however, at fixed stellar mass the fraction of luminous red galaxies is higher in denser environments (e.g., Kauffmann et al. 2004; van den Bosch et al. 2008).”
Galaxy evolution in cosmological simulations with outflows ― I. Stellar masses and star formation rates (2011, result): “…there are seen to be a significant number of dwarf galaxies with little or no ongoing star formation, SDSS data (Weinmann et al. 2006; van den Bosch et al. 2008) actually indicate a trend opposite to that predicted here, namely a smaller fraction of red satellites (and centrals) at smaller…”
Measures of Galaxy Environment I - What is "Environment"? (2011, methodology): “Indeed, a number of authors report that, for many aspects of the galaxy population, environmental dependence is often weak once stellar mass is fixed (van den Bosch et al. 2008a,b; Scodeggio et al. 2009; Bolzonella et al. 2010; Vulcani et al. 2011).”
Galaxy assembly bias: a significant source of systematic error in the galaxy–halo relationship (2013, methodology): “Although dust obscuration complicates the use of F satq to quantify star formation activity (see, e.g., Wetzel et al. 2012), this statistic is used widely throughout the literature for this purpose (van den Bosch et al. 2008; Kovac et al. 2013; Tinker et al. 2013).”
Are Brightest Halo Galaxies Central Galaxies (2010, background): “However, recent analyses of galaxies in groups and clusters (e.g., Weinmann et al. 2006; Skibba et al. 2007; von der Linden et al. 2007; van den Bosch et al. 2008; Pasquali et al. 2009, 2010; Skibba 2009; Hansen et al. 2009) and halo model analyses of galaxy clustering (e.g., Skibba et al. 2006;…”
Galaxy evolution in groups and clusters: star formation rates, red sequence fractions and the persistent bimodality (2011, methodology): “Though again, there is debate about the steepness of radial gradients, the extent to which they depend on halo mass and whether they are a by-product of satellite mass segregation (van den Bosch et al. 2008b; Pasquali et al. 2009).”
MASS AND ENVIRONMENT AS DRIVERS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION IN SDSS AND zCOSMOS AND THE ORIGIN OF THE SCHECHTER FUNCTION (2010, background): “%) of the fraction of satellites that are quenched from van den Bosch et al. (2008).”
Star formation and AGN activity in SDSS cluster galaxies (2009, background): “It has been claimed that the dependence of the galaxy population on environment is simply a consequence of a varying galaxy stellar mass function with local density (e.g. Bamford et al. 2009; van den Bosch et al. 2008b).”
GALAXY CLUSTERING IN THE COMPLETED SDSS REDSHIFT SURVEY: THE DEPENDENCE ON COLOR AND LUMINOSITY (2010, background): “The fit to the smallest scale data points is improved by increasing the galaxy concentration parameter (van den Bosch et al. 2008a) to twice the dark matter value, steepening the profile of the one-halo term.”
MERGERS IN ΛCDM: UNCERTAINTIES IN THEORETICAL PREDICTIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MERGER RATE (2010, background): “…is also seen in many of the color or SFR-based studies above; for example, Weinmann et al. (2009a); Guo et al. (2009); Wang et al. (2009); van den Bosch et al. (2008); Kang & van den Bosch (2008) find that only in the most extreme (rare) environments could there be significant gas depletion in…”
The correlation of star formation quenching with internal galaxy properties and environment (2008, methodology): “Using the much larger galaxy group catalogue of Y07, based on the SDSS Data Release (DR4), van den Bosch et al. (2008a) showed that, on average, satellite galaxies are redder and more concentrated than central galaxies of the same stellar mass.”
Satellite kinematics – III. Halo masses of central galaxies in SDSS (2010, neutral): “The k-corrections to redshift 0.0 can be reasonably well described by (van den Bosch et al. 2008) k0.”
Galaxy Zoo: Disentangling the Environmental Dependence of Morphology and Colour ⋆ (2008, methodology): “…‘segregation’ within haloes, defined with respect to the halo radii, have been observed in group and cluster catalogues (Hansen et al. 2007, van den Bosch et al. 2008b), and they appear to be approximately independent of halo mass. (Note that colour gradients are much stronger than luminosity…”