The Dependence of Galaxy Type on Host Halo Mass

We study the mean environments of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as a function of rest-frame luminosity and color. Overdensities in galaxy number are estimated in $8 h^{-1} \mathrm{Mpc}$ and $1 h^{-1} \mathrm{Mpc}$ spheres centered on $125,000$ galaxies taken from the SDSS spectroscopic sample. We find that, at constant color, overdensity is independent of luminosity for galaxies with the blue colors of spirals. This suggests that, at fixed star-formation history, s...

[Abridged] The properties of observed galaxies and dark matter haloes in simulations depend on their environment. The term environment has been used to describe a wide variety of measures that may or may not correlate with each other. Popular measures of environment include the distance to the N'th nearest neighbour, the number density of objects within some distance, or the mass of the host dark matter halo. We use results from the Millennium simulation and a semi-analytic m...

Using low-redshift (z<0.09) samples of AGNs, normal galaxies and groups of galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we study the environments of type 1 and type 2 AGNs both on small and large scales. Comparisons are made for galaxy samples matched in redshift, $r$-band luminosity, [OIII] luminosity, and also the position in groups (central or satellite). We find that type 2 AGNs and normal galaxies reside in similar environments. Type 1 and type 2 AGNs have...

The properties of dark matter halos, including mass growth, correlate with larger scale environment at fixed mass, an effect known as assembly bias. However, whether this environmental dependence manifests itself in galaxy properties remains unclear. We apply a group-finding algorithm to DR7 of the SDSS to estimate the halo mass of each galaxy and to decompose galaxies into those that exist at the centers of distinct halos and those that orbit as satellites within larger halo...

We provide a physical interpretation and explanation of the morphology-density relation for galaxies, drawing on stellar masses, star formation rates, axis ratios and group halo masses from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We first re-cast the classical morphology-density relation in more quantitative terms, using low star formation rate (quiescence) as a proxy for early-type morphology and dark matter halo mass from a group catalog as a proxy for environmental density: for gala...

We review the physical properties of nearby, relatively luminous galaxies, using results from newly available massive data sets together with more detailed observations. First, we present the global distribution of properties, including the optical and ultraviolet luminosity, stellar mass, and atomic gas mass functions. Second, we describe the shift of the galaxy population from "late" galaxy types in underdense regions to "early" galaxy types in overdense regions. We emphasi...

In this work we introduce a new method to perform the identification of groups of galaxies and present results of the identification of galaxy groups in the Seventh Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-DR7). Our methodology follows an approach that resembles the standard friends-of-friends (FoF) method. However, it uses assumptions on the mass of the dark matter halo hosting a group of galaxies to link galaxies in the group using a local linking length. Our meth...

We investigate the dependence of galaxy structure on a variety of galactic and environmental parameters for ~500,000 galaxies at z<0.2, taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 7 (SDSS-DR7). We utilise bulge-to-total stellar mass ratio, (B/T)_*, as the primary indicator of galactic structure, which circumvents issues of morphological dependence on waveband. We rank galaxy and environmental parameters in terms of how predictive they are of galaxy structure, using a...

We present a unified picture on the evolution of galaxy luminosity and morphology. Galaxy morphology is found to depend critically on the local environment set up by the nearest neighbor galaxy in addition to luminosity and the large scale density. When a galaxy is located farther than the virial radius from its closest neighbor, the probability for the galaxy to have an early morphological type is an increasing function only of luminosity and the local density due to the nea...

We present the observed fraction of galaxies with an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) as a function of environment in the Early Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Using 4921 galaxies between 0.05 <= z <= 0.095, and brighter than M_r* = -20.0 (or M* +1.45), we find at least ~ 20% of these galaxies possess an unambiguous detection of an AGN, but this fraction could be as high as ~40% after we model the ambiguous emission line galaxies in our sample. We have studi...