Galaxy Star Formation as a Function of Environment in the Early Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By P. Gomez, Robert Nichol, C. Miller, M. Balogh, T. Goto, Ann Zabludoff, K. Romer, Mariangela Bernardi, R. Sheth, Andrew M. Hopkins and 7 more. 2002

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We present in this paper a detailed analysis of the effect of environment on the star formation activity of galaxies within the Early Data Release (EDR) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We have used the Hα emission line to derive the star formation rate (SFR) for each galaxy within a volume-limited sample of 8598 galaxies with 0.05 ≤ z ≤ 0.095 and M(r*) ≤ -20.45. We find that the SFR of galaxies is strongly correlated with the local (projected) galaxy density, and thus we present here a density-SFR relation that is analogous to the density-morphology relation. The effect of density on the SFR of galaxies is seen in three ways. First, the overall distribution of SFRs is shifted to lower values in dense environments compared with the field population. Second, the effect is most noticeable for the strongly star-forming galaxies (Hα EW > 5 Å) in the 75th percentile of the SFR distribution. Third, there is a "break" (or characteristic density) in the density-SFR relation at a local galaxy density of ~1 h Mpc-2. To understand this break further, we have studied the SFR of galaxies as a function of clustercentric radius from 17 clusters and groups objectively selected from the SDSS EDR data. The distribution of SFRs of cluster galaxies begins to change, compared with the field population, at a clustercentric radius of 3-4 virial radii (at the >1 σ statistical significance), which is consistent with the characteristic break in density that we observe in the density-SFR relation. This effect with clustercentric radius is again most noticeable for the most strongly star-forming galaxies. Our tests suggest that the density-morphology relation alone is unlikely to explain the density-SFR relation we observe. For example, we have used the (inverse) concentration index of SDSS galaxies to classify late-type galaxies and show that the distribution of the star-forming (EW Hα > 5 Å) late-type galaxies is different in dense regions (within 2 virial radii) compared with similar galaxies in the field. However, at present, we are unable to make definitive statements about the independence of the density-morphology and density-SFR relation. We have tested our work against potential systematic uncertainties including stellar absorption, reddening, SDSS survey strategy, SDSS analysis pipelines, and aperture bias. Our observations are in qualitative agreement with recent simulations of hierarchical galaxy formation that predict a decrease in the SFR of galaxies within the virial radius. Our results are in agreement with recent 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey results as well as consistent with previous observations of a decrease in the SFR of galaxies in the cores of distant clusters. Taken together, these works demonstrate that the decrease in SFR of galaxies in dense environments is a universal phenomenon over a wide range in density (from 0.08 to 10 h Mpc -2) and redshift (out to z ≃ 0.5).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa7fe6d077f00dd6f214811703c078b58b151a91

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Citations in the corpus

Star Formation Rate Indicators in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2003, methodology): “The small number of systems with z < 0.05 (the lower redshift limit used by Gómez et al. 2003) which show slight overestimates in their aperture corrected SFRHα relative to SFR1.”
Virgo Galaxies with Long One-sided H I Tails (2007, background): “For example Solanes et al. (2001) find that gas deficiency gradually decreases out to two Abell radii from the cluster center and Lewis et al. (2002) and Gomez et al. (2003) find that the star formation rate depends on local galaxy density.”
The GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey - VIII. Final data release. The effect of group environment on the gas content of massive galaxies (2013, background): “This is in qualitative agreement with optical studies, which established that the star formation properties of galaxies are affected by the environment well before reaching the highdensity regimes that are typical of clusters (e.g. Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003).”
VLA H I Observations of Gas Stripping in the Virgo Cluster Spiral NGC 4522 (2004, background): “…indeed the case it may help explain a number of phenomena seen in the outskirts of clusters (van Gorkom 2003), such as the HI deficiency seen out to 2 Abell radii (Solanes et al 2001), and suppressed star formation rates as far out as 2 RA (Balogh et al. 1998; Gomez et al. 2003; Lewis et al. 2002).”
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE: CONFIRMATION OF AN INCREASING STAR FORMATION–DENSITY RELATION IN A CLUSTER AT z = 1.62 (2010, background): “A plethora of studies utilizing multiwavelength tracers of activity have shown that star formation universally decreases with increasing galaxy density at z < 1 (e.g. Hashimoto et al. 1998; Ellingson et al. 2001; Gómez et al. 2003; Patel et al. 2009).”
The Build-up of the Colour-Magnitude Relation (2005, methodology): “Based on data from large surveys of the local Universe, Lewis et al. (2002) and Gómez et al. (2003) showed that galaxy star formation begins to decline sharply, in a statistical sense, at a certain local density.”
Internal and Collective Properties of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2006, background): “Many authors in the past have investigated the relations between environment and galaxy properties (Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003; Goto et al. 2003a; Balogh et al. 2004a, 2004b; Hogg et al. 2004; Tanaka et al. 2004; Kuehn & Ryden 2005; Desroches et al. 2006).”
SPECTROSCOPIC CONFIRMATION OF TWO MASSIVE RED-SEQUENCE-SELECTED GALAXY CLUSTERS AT z ∼ 1.2 IN THE SpARCS-NORTH CLUSTER SURVEY (2008, background): “Properties such 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),…”
Galaxy bimodality versus stellar mass and environment (2006, background): “The fraction of galaxies with EW > 4Å varied continuously with environmental density and there was no evidence of a break density that had been reported before (Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003).”
Galaxy Zoo: Disentangling the Environmental Dependence of Morphology and Colour ⋆ (2008, background): “…environments, while galaxies with red colours and low star formation rates tend to reside in overdense environments (e.g., Lewis et al. 2002, Gómez et al. 2003, Kauffmann et al. 2004, Zehavi et al. 2005, Weinmann et al. 2006, Sheth et al. 2006, Tinker et al. 2008, Bamford et al. 2008,…”
The Effect of Environment on the Ultraviolet Color-Magnitude Relation of Early-Type Galaxies (2006, background): “Studies in both 2dF (Lewis et al. 2002) and SDSS. (Gómez et al. 2003) find that above a certain ‘‘break’’ local density, star formation rapidly declines.”
The effect of the environment on the Hi scaling relations (2011, background): “…showing that cluster galaxies have in general a lower star formation rate than their field counterpart (Boselli & Gavazzi 2006; Gavazzi et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003), suggesting that the gas loss is behind the quenching of the star formation activity (Gavazzi et al. 2006; Cortese & Hughes 2009).”
Dependence of galaxy quenching on halo mass and distance from its centre (2012, result): “The decreased quenching with D also agrees with several other studies of SFR or the blue/red fractions within groups and clusters (Gómez et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004; Tanaka et al. 2004; Rines et al. 2005; Haines et al. 2007; Wolf et al. 2009; von der Linden et al. 2010).”
The dust scaling relations of the Herschel Reference Survey (2012, background): “…the bulk of their stellar populations earlier than dwarf galaxies; Cowie et al. 1996; Gavazzi et al. 1996), and to the environment (i.e., at the current epoch, galaxies in high density regions are less active than isolated systems; Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003; Boselli & Gavazzi 2006).”
THE GEMINI CLUSTER ASTROPHYSICS SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY (GCLASS): THE ROLE OF ENVIRONMENT AND SELF-REGULATION IN GALAXY EVOLUTION AT z ∼ 1 (2011, background): “…2004; Balogh et al. 2004b; Baldry et al. 2006; van den Bosch et al. 2008; Skibba et al. 2009; von der Linden et al. 2010), less star forming (e.g., Gómez et al. 2003; Kauffmann et al. 2004; Balogh et al. 2004a; Weinmann et al. 2006; von der Linden et al. 2010; Peng et al. 2010; Weinmann et al.…”
The dependence of star formation activity on environment and stellar mass at z∼ 1 from the HiZELS-Hα survey (2010, background): “At the present epoch, star formation activity is strongly dependent on environment (e.g. Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003; Tanaka et al. 2004; Mahajan et al. 2010): while clusters of galaxies seem to be primarily populated by passively-evolving galaxies, star-forming galaxies are mainly found…”
The accretion of galaxies into groups and clusters (2009, background): “In particular, galaxy groups and clusters have lower average galaxy star formation rates (Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003), lower fractions of disc galaxies (Dressler et al. 1997; McGee et al. 2008) and higher red fractions (Balogh et al. 2004; Weinmann et al. 2006) than field galaxies.”
Galaxy ecology: groups and low-density environments in the SDSS and 2dFGRS (2003, background): “…that based on the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS, Mateus & Sodré 2003; Lewis et al. 2002a, hereafter Paper I) and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, Gomez et al. 2003, hereafter Paper II) has shown that the correlation between galaxy type and local density extends to very low densities, well…”
BUDHIES II: a phase-space view of H i gas stripping and star formation quenching in cluster galaxies (2015, background): “(e.g. Dressler 1980; Lewis et al. 2002; Gómez et al. 2003; Koopmann & Kenney 2004; Boselli & Gavazzi 2006; Poggianti et al. 2006; Moran et al. 2007; Bamford et al. 2009; Jaffé et al. 2011b).”
Fitting the integrated spectral energy distributions of galaxies (2010, methodology): “The effect of this can be tested by comparing result of a fit to the photometry of the whole galaxy against the photometric fit corresponding to the area of the fibre only (e.g. Gómez et al. 2003; Brinchmann et al. 2004).”