ECO and RESOLVE: Galaxy Disk Growth in Environmental Context

TL;DR

This study investigates how galaxy environments influence disk growth and morphology, revealing that low-mass group halos are conducive to disk regrowth, especially in blue early-type galaxies, and clarifies the roles of environment, mass, and color.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the environmental conditions favoring galaxy disk growth and clarifies the interplay between morphology, mass, and environment in galaxy evolution.

Findings

Blue early-type galaxies are more common below 10^11.5 Msun group halo mass.

Blue early and late-type galaxies inhabit similar environments at fixed baryonic mass.

Red galaxies tend to reside in higher mass halos compared to blue counterparts at fixed mass.

Abstract

We study the relationships between galaxy environments and galaxy properties related to disk (re)growth, considering two highly complete samples that are approximately baryonic mass limited into the high-mass dwarf galaxy regime, the Environmental COntext (ECO) catalog (data release herein) and the B-semester region of the REsolved Spectroscopy Of a Local VolumE (RESOLVE) survey. We quantify galaxy environments using both group identification and smoothed galaxy density field methods. We use by-eye and quantitative morphological classifications plus atomic gas content measurements and estimates. We find that blue early-type (E/S0) galaxies, gas-dominated galaxies, and UV-bright disk host galaxies all become distinctly more common below group halo mass ~10^11.5 Msun, implying that this low group halo mass regime may be a preferred regime for significant disk growth activity. We also find that blue early-type and blue late-type galaxies inhabit environments of similar group halo mass at fixed baryonic mass, consistent with a scenario in which blue early types can regrow late-type disks. In fact, we find that the only significant difference in the typical group halo mass inhabited by different galaxy classes is for satellite galaxies with different colors, where at fixed baryonic mass red early and late types have higher typical group halo masses than blue early and late types. More generally, we argue that the traditional morphology-environment relation (i.e., that denser environments tend to have more early types) can be largely attributed to the morphology-galaxy mass relation for centrals and the color-environment relation for satellites.