Bibcode
La Barbera, F.; Lopes, P. A. A.; de Carvalho, R. R.; de la Rosa, I. G.; Berlind, A. A.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 408, Issue 3, pp. 1361-1386.
Advertised on:
11
2010
Citations
56
Refereed citations
53
Description
We analyse the Fundamental Plane (FP) relation of 39993 early-type
galaxies (ETGs) in the optical (griz) and 5080 ETGs in the near-infrared
(NIR; YJHK) wavebands, forming an optical+NIR sample of 4589 galaxies.
We focus on the analysis of the FP as a function of the environment
where galaxies reside. We characterize the environment using the largest
group catalogue, based on 3D data, generated from the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey at low redshift (z < 0.1). We find that the intercept `c' of
the FP decreases smoothly from high- to low-density regions, implying
that galaxies at low density have on average lower mass-to-light ratios
than their high-density counterparts. The `c' also decreases as a
function of the mean characteristic mass of the parent galaxy group.
However, this trend is weak and completely accounted for by the
variation of `c' with local density. The variation of the FP offset is
the same in all wavebands, implying that ETGs at low density have
younger luminosity-weighted ages than cluster galaxies, consistent with
the expectations of semi-analytical models of galaxy formation. We
measure an age variation of ~0.048 dex (~11 per cent) per decade of
local galaxy density. This implies an age difference of about 32 per
cent (~3Gyr) between galaxies in the regions of highest density and the
field. We find the metallicity decreasing, at ~2σ, from low to
high density. We also find 2.5σ evidence that the variation in age
per decade of local density augments, up to a factor of 2, for galaxies
residing in massive relative to poor groups. The velocity dispersion
slope of the FP, a, tends to decrease with local galaxy density, with
galaxies in groups having smaller a than those in the field, independent
of the waveband used to measure the structural parameters. Environmental
effects (such as tidal stripping) may elucidate this result, producing a
steeper variation of dark-matter fraction and/or non-homology along the
ETG's sequence at higher density. In the optical, the surface brightness
slope, b, of the FP increases with local galaxy density, being larger
for group relative to field galaxies. The difference vanishes in the
NIR, as field galaxies show a small (~2.5 per cent) but significant
increase of b from g through K, while group galaxies (particularly those
in rich clusters) do not. The trend of b with the environment results
from galaxies residing in more massive clusters, since for groups no
variation of b with local density is detected. A possible explanation
for these findings is that the variation of stellar population
properties with mass in ETGs is shallower for galaxies at high density,
resulting from tidal stripping and quenching of star formation in
galaxies falling into the group's potential well. We do not detect any
dependence of the FP coefficients on the presence of substructures in
parent galaxy groups.