What Aspects of Galaxy Environment Matter?

By M. Blanton, A. Berlind. 2006

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We determine what aspects of the density field surrounding galaxies most affect their properties. For Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies, we measure the group environment, meaning the host group luminosity and the distance from the group center (hereafter "groupocentric distance"). For comparison, we measure the surrounding density field on scales ranging from 100 h-1 kpc to 10 h-1 Mpc. We use the relationship between color and group environment to test the null hypothesis that only the group environment matters, searching for a residual dependence of properties on the surrounding density. Generally, red galaxies are slightly more clustered on small scales (~100-300 h-1 kpc) than the null hypothesis predicts, possibly indicating that substructure within groups has some importance. At large scales (>1 h-1 Mpc), the actual projected correlation functions of galaxies are biased at less than the 5% level with respect to the null hypothesis predictions. We exclude strongly the converse null hypothesis: that only the surrounding density (on any scale) matters. These results generally encourage the use of the halo model description of galaxy bias, which models the galaxy distribution as a function of host halo mass alone. We compare these results to proposed galaxy formation scenarios within the cold dark matter cosmological model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e8b02ae1277b2db75eed83f07b20374b2528e880

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Citations in the corpus

GALAXY PAIRS IN THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY. I. STAR FORMATION, ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS FRACTION, AND THE LUMINOSITY/MASS–METALLICITY RELATION (2008, background): “However, it is now emerging that density on smaller scales can be the major impetus behind galaxy evolution (e.g., Lewis et al. 2002; Gomez et al. 2003; Blanton & Berlind 2007).”
Galaxy luminosities, stellar masses, sizes, velocity dispersions as a function of morphological type (2009, background): “This is typically done by noting that the colour–magnitude distribution is bimodal (e.g. Baldry et al. 2004), and then adopting a crude approximation to this bimodality (e.g. Zehavi et al. 2005; Blanton & Berlind 2007; Skibba & Sheth 2009).”
Galaxy Zoo: Disentangling the Environmental Dependence of Morphology and Colour ⋆ (2008, methodology): “In Figure 6, we show the projected clustering of all galaxies, and of red and blue galaxies separately, using the following colour-magnitude cut (used by Blanton & Berlind 2007, Skibba & Sheth 2009): (g − r) cut = 0.8 − 0.03 (Mr + 20).”
Physical properties and environments of nearby galaxies (2009, background): “Much of the environmental dependence can be understood in terms of the group environment: what mass halo hosts the galaxy, and its position within that halo (Blanton & Berlind 2007).”
THE GALAXY CONTENT OF SDSS CLUSTERS AND GROUPS (2007, background): “Some authors (De Propris et al. 2004; Weinmann et al. 2006a; Blanton & Berlind 2007) have also found qualitatively similar behavior for the type fraction as a function of radius; however, this trend is very weak in both the Wilman et al. (2005) and Gerke et al. (2007) data, but there are large…”
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).”
Galaxy evolution in groups and clusters: satellite star formation histories and quenching time-scales in a hierarchical Universe (2012, background): “…environmental dependence has been shown to result from satellite galaxies and the properties of their host dark matter halo (Weinmann et al. 2006; Blanton & Berlind 2007; Wilman et al. 2010; Tinker et al. 2011), where ‘satellite’ galaxies are all those that are not the massive ‘central’ galaxy…”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – II. The effect of environment on interactions (2010, background): “Disentanglingthe process(es) that drive these environmental dependences, the scales on which environment matters and identifying which are the primary changes in galaxy properties is a major theme in contemporary astrophysics (e.g. Blanton & Berlind 2007; Park & Choi 2009; Deng et al. 2009).”
Dependence of galaxy quenching on halo mass and distance from its centre (2012, result): “Our result that quenching of satellites correlates with Mh and anticorrelates with D is consistent with the results of Blanton & Berlind (2007) and Hansen et al. (2009) (who use group luminosity and group richness rather than Mh).”
GALAXY CLUSTERING IN THE COMPLETED SDSS REDSHIFT SURVEY: THE DEPENDENCE ON COLOR AND LUMINOSITY (2010, methodology): “…of halo formation history that correlate with large-scale environment at fixed halo mass. Conversely, limits on environmental variations (e.g., Blanton & Berlind 2007; Tinker et al. 2008) limit the degree to which galaxy properties can be driven by quantities such as halo formation time or…”
Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment (2008, background): “The right panel indicates a small trend versus the summedr-band luminosity of group members, though this is small compared with the variation with environment and, as we shall see below, stellar mass. Blanton & Berlind (2007) find a strong variation of red fraction with group luminosity.”
Measures of Galaxy Environment I - What is "Environment"? (2011, methodology): “This also agrees with Blanton & Berlind (2007) who find that galaxy distributions are only affected by the host dark matter halo, and not by the surrounding density field, for the SDSS galaxy group catalogue.”
Galaxy evolution in groups and clusters: star formation rates, red sequence fractions and the persistent bimodality (2011, methodology): “…Blanton & Berlind 2007; Hansen et al. 2009; Kimm et al. 2009), as well as satellites being more likely to be quenched at smaller radii (Weinmann et al. 2006; Blanton & Berlind 2007; Hansen et al. 2009) with less massive satellites exhibiting stronger radial gradients (von der Linden et al. 2010).”
Star formation and AGN activity in SDSS cluster galaxies (2009, background): “…of star-forming galaxies declines towards the cluster center, as traced both y galaxy color (e.g. Kodama & Bower 2001; Quintero et al. 2006; Blanton & Berlind 2007; Hansen et al. 2009) and emission-line strength (e.g. Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004a; Christlein &…”
A halo model of galaxy colours and clustering in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2008, background): “We also expect our model to be in qualitative agreement with the findings of Blanton & Berlind (2007).”
The dark side of galaxy colour (2013, background): “This small-scale environmental dependence has been shown to be driven primarily by correlations between the properties of the host halo and its satellite galaxies (Blanton & Berlind 2007; Wetzel et al. 2011; Tinker et al. 2011; Wetzel et al. 2012).”