Cold gas stripping in satellite galaxies: from pairs to clusters

By T. Brown, B. Catinella, L. Cortese, C. Lagos, R. Dav'e, Virginia A. Kilborn, M. Haynes, R. Giovanelli, M. Rafieferantsoa. 2016

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we investigate environment driven gas depletion in satellite galaxies, taking full advantage of the atomic hydrogen (HI) spectral stacking technique to quantify the gas content for the entire gas-poor to -rich regime. We do so using a multi-wavelength sample of 10,600 satellite galaxies, selected according to stellar mass (log M$_{\star}$/M$_{\odot}$ $\geq$ 9) and redshift (0.02 $\leq$ z $\leq$ 0.05) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with HI data from the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey. Using key HI-to-stellar mass scaling relations, we present evidence that the gas content of satellite galaxies is, to a significant extent, dependent on the environment in which a galaxy resides. For the first time, we demonstrate that systematic environmental suppression of gas content at both fixed stellar mass and fixed specific star formation rate (sSFR) in satellite galaxies begins in halo masses typical of the group regime (log M$_{h}$/M$_{\odot}$ < 13.5), well before galaxies reach the cluster environment. We also show that environment driven gas depletion is more closely associated to halo mass than local density. Our results are then compared with state-of-the-art semi-analytic models and hydrodynamical simulations and discussed within this framework, showing that more work is needed if models are to reproduce the observations. We conclude that the observed decrease of gas content in the group and cluster environments cannot be reproduced by starvation of the gas supply alone and invoke fast acting processes such as ram-pressure stripping of cold gas to explain this.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e992c061f3ec8099be6fd90bbc935c32fc766f60

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

xGASS: total cold gas scaling relations and molecular-to-atomic gas ratios of galaxies in the local Universe (2018, background): “Comparisons between observed gas scaling relations from stellar mass-selected samples and simulated ones have highlighted areas where models need improvement (e.g. Kauffmann et al. 2012; Brown et al. 2017; Stevens & Brown 2017; Zoldan et al. 2017).”
The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) Light Curve Server v1.0 (2017, background): “Rarer extragalactic events are tidal disruption events (TDEs), where the majority of the best studied TDEs have been discovered by ASAS-SN (Holoien et al. 2014b, 2016a,b, Brown et al. 2016, 2017a) or are present in ASAS-SN (Brown et al. 2017b), and “changing-look” AGN (Shappee et al. 2014).”
Weighing Black Holes Using Tidal Disruption Events (2018, unknown): “…(Hung et al. 2017), ASASSN-14li (Holoien et al. 2016b; Brown et al. 2017), ASASSN-15oi (Holoien et al. 2016a), ASASSN-14ae (Holoien et al. 2014; Brown et al. 2016), OGLE16aaa (Wyrzykowski et al. 2017), D1-9 (Gezari et al. 2008), D3-13 (Gezari et al. 2008), TDE1 (van Velzen et al. 2011), and…”