Bibcode
Grützbauch, Ruth; Conselice, Christopher J.; Varela, J.; Bundy, Kevin; Cooper, Michael C.; Skibba, Ramin; Willmer, Christopher N. A.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 411, Issue 2, pp. 929-946.
Advertised on:
2
2011
Citations
73
Refereed citations
67
Description
We present a study characterizing the environments of galaxies in the
redshift range of 0.4 < z < 1 based on data from the POWIR
near-infrared imaging and DEEP2 spectroscopic redshift surveys, down to
a stellar mass of log M*= 10.25 M&sun;. Galaxy
environments are measured in terms of nearest-neighbour densities as
well as fixed aperture densities and kinematical and dynamical
parameters of neighbour galaxies within a radius of 1 h-1
Mpc. We disentangle the correlations between galaxy stellar mass, galaxy
colour and galaxy environment, using not only galaxy number densities,
but also other environmental characteristics such as velocity
dispersion, mean harmonic radius and crossing time. We find that galaxy
colour and the fraction of blue galaxies depends very strongly on
stellar mass at 0.4 < z < 1, while a weak additional dependence on
local number densities is in place at lower redshifts (0.4 < z <
0.7). This environmental influence is most visible in the colours of
intermediate-mass galaxies (10.5 < log M* < 11),
whereas colours of lower- and higher-mass galaxies remain largely
unchanged with redshift and environment. At a fixed stellar mass, the
colour-density relation almost disappears, while the colour-stellar mass
relation is present at all local densities. We find a weak correlation
between stellar mass and environment at intermediate redshifts, which
contributes to the overall colour-density relation. We furthermore do
not find a significant correlation between galaxy colour and virial
mass, i.e. parent dark matter halo mass. Galaxy stellar mass thus
appears to be the crucial defining parameter for intrinsic galaxy
properties such as ongoing star formation and colour.