Environmental Dependence of Properties of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Abstract

We investigate the dependence of physical properties of galaxies brighter than M_r=-18.0 in the SDSS on environment, as measured by local density using an adaptive smoothing kernel. We find that variations of galaxy properties with environment are almost entirely due to the dependence of morphology and luminosity on environment. Because galaxy properties depend not only on luminosity but also on morphology, it is clear that galaxy properties cannot be determined solely by dark halo mass. When morphology and luminosity are fixed, other physical properties, such as color, color-gradient, concentration, size, velocity dispersion, and star formation rate, are nearly independent of local density. The only feature is the sharp decrease of late type fraction above the critical luminosity of about M_r=-21.3 in the morphology versus luminosity relation. Weak residual dependences on environment include that of the color of late-types (bluer at lower density) and of the L-sigma relation of early-types (larger dispersion at higher density for bright galaxies). The early-type fraction is a monotonically increasing function of local density and luminosity. The morphology-density- luminosity relation should be a key constraint on galaxy formation models. We demonstrate that the dependence on environment of the morphology of galaxie originates from variations in density on effective Gaussian smoothing scales much smaller than 12 h^{-1}Mpc. We find that galaxy morphology varies both with density measured on an effective Gaussian smoothing scale of 4.7 h^{-1} Mpc and on distance to the nearest bright galaxy (particularly, for about 0.2 h^{-1}Mpc). We propose a mechanism that the morphology of galaxies in galaxy systems is transformed by the tidal force.