Smaller stellar disc scale lengths in rich environments
Abstract
We investigate the dependence of stellar disc scale lengths on environment for a sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 galaxies with published photometric bulge-disc decompositions. We compare disc scale lengths at fixed bulge mass for galaxies in an isolated field environment to galaxies in X-ray rich and X-ray poor groups. At low bulge mass, stellar disc scale lengths in X-ray rich groups are smaller compared to discs in both X-ray poor groups and in isolated field environments. This decrease in disc scale length is largely independent of halo mass, though shows some dependence on group-centric distance. We also find that stellar disc scale lengths are smaller in X-ray rich environments for a subset of star-forming galaxies and for galaxies of different morphological types. We note that disc scale lengths of low mass galaxies are known to have large systematic uncertainties, however we focus on differences between samples with the same measurement biases. Our results show that stellar disc scale lengths depend on X-ray brightness, a tracer of IGM density, suggesting a role for hydrodynamic processes such as ram-pressure stripping and/or starvation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Aug 21, 2019
- Source ID
- 10.1093/mnras/stz2305
Entities
People
- Ian Roberts
- Laura Parker
- Melanie L Demers
Organizations
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- American Museum of Natural History
- Case Western Reserve University
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Drexel University
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
- Institute for Advanced Study
- Johns Hopkins University
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Max Planck Society
- McMaster University
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- National Science Foundation
- New Mexico State University
- Ohio State University
- Princeton University
- United States Department of Energy
- United States Naval Observatory
- University of Basel
- University of Cambridge
- University of Chicago
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Portsmouth
- University of Washington