Mass and environment as drivers of galaxy evolution in SDSS and zCOSMOS and the origin of the Schechter function

Details Mass and environment as drivers of galaxy evolution in SDSS and zCOSMOS and the origin of the Schechter function Mass and environment as drivers of galaxy evolution in SDSS and zCOSMOS and the origin of the Schechter function

2010-03-24

arxiv.org/abs/1003.4747v2

2010ApJ...721..193P

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

66 pages, 19 figures, 1 movie, accepted for publication in ApJ. The movie is also available at http://www.exp-astro.phys.eth

Scientific paper

10.1088/0004-637X/721/1/193

We explore the inter-relationships between mass, star-formation rate and environment in the SDSS, zCOSMOS and other surveys. The differential effects of mass and environment are completely separable to z ~ 1, indicating that two distinct processes are operating, "mass-quenching" and "environment-quenching". Environment-quenching, at fixed over-density, evidently does not change with epoch to z ~ 1, suggesting that it occurs as large-scale structure develops in the Universe. The observed constancy of the mass-function shape for star-forming galaxies, demands that the mass-quenching of galaxies around and above M*, must be proportional to their star-formation rates at all z < 2. We postulate that this simple mass-quenching law also holds over a much broader range of stellar mass and epoch. These two simple quenching processes, plus some additional quenching due to merging, then naturally produce (a) a quasi-static Schechter mass function for star-forming galaxies with a value of M* that is set by the proportionality between the star-formation and mass-quenching rates, (b) a double Schechter function for passive galaxies with two components: the dominant one is produced by mass-quenching and has exactly the same M* as the star-forming galaxies but an alpha shallower by +1, while the other is produced by environment effects and has the same M* and alpha as the star-forming galaxies, and is larger in high density environments. Subsequent merging of quenched galaxies modifies these predictions somewhat in the denser environments, slightly increasing M* and making alpha more negative. All of these detailed quantitative relationships between the Schechter parameters are indeed seen in the SDSS, lending strong support to our simple empirically-based model. The model naturally produces for passive galaxies the "anti-hierarchical" run of mean ages and alpha-element abundances with mass.

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