Bibcode
Huertas-Company, M.; Shankar, F.; Mei, S.; Bernardi, M.; Aguerri, J. A. L.; Meert, A.; Vikram, V.
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 779, Issue 1, article id. 29, 9 pp. (2013).
Advertised on:
12
2013
Journal
Citations
66
Refereed citations
63
Description
The early-type galaxy (ETG) mass-size relation has largely been studied
to understand how these galaxies assembled their mass. One key
observational result of the last years is that massive galaxies
increased their size by a factor of a few at fixed stellar mass from z ~
2. Hierarchical models favor minor mergers as a plausible driver of this
size growth. Some of these models predict a significant environmental
dependence in the sense that galaxies residing in more massive halos
tend to be larger than galaxies in lower mass halos, at fixed stellar
mass and redshift. At present, observational results of this
environmental dependence are contradictory. In this paper we revisit
this issue in the local universe, by investigating how the sizes of
massive ETGs depend on a large-scale environment using an updated and
accurate sample of ETGs in different environments—field, group,
and clusters—from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7. Our analysis
does not show any significant environmental dependence of the sizes of
central and satellite ETGs at fixed stellar mass at z ~ 0. The size-mass
relation of early-type galaxies at z ~ 0 seems to be universal, i.e.,
independent of the mass of the host halo and of the position of the
galaxy in that halo (central or satellite). The result is robust to
different galaxy selections based on star formation, morphology, or
central density. Considering our observational errors and the size of
the sample, any size ratio larger than 30%-40% between massive galaxies
(log(M */M ☉) > 11) living in clusters
and in the field can be ruled out at 3σ level.
Related projects
Galaxy Evolution in Clusters of Galaxies
Galaxies in the universe can be located in different environments, some of them are isolated or in low density regions and they are usually called field galaxies. The others can be located in galaxy associations, going from loose groups to clusters or even superclusters of galaxies. One of the foremost challenges of the modern Astrophysics is to
Jairo
Méndez Abreu