# Conditional Quenching: A detailed look at the SFR-Density Relation at z ~ 0.9 from ORELSE

## TL;DR

This study investigates how star formation rates depend on environment at z ~ 0.9, revealing that intermediate-mass galaxies experience environmental quenching, with a simple model supporting the significance of environment-driven star formation suppression.

## Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the SFR-density relation at z ~ 0.9 and introduces a toy model to interpret environmental quenching mechanisms.

## Key findings

- SFR depends on environment for intermediate-mass galaxies.
- Mass has minimal impact on SFR across environments.
- Environmental quenching begins at group-like densities.

## Abstract

We present a study of the star-formation rate (SFR)-density relation at z ~ 0.9 using data drawn from the Observations of Redshift Evolution in Large Scale Environments (ORELSE) survey. We find that SFR does depend on environment, but only for intermediate-stellar mass galaxies (10^10.1 < M* / Msol < 10^10.8) wherein the median SFR at the highest densities is 0.2-0.3 dex less than at lower densities at a significance of 4 sigma. Interestingly, mass does not drive SFR; galaxies that are more/less massive have SFRs that vary at most by ~20% across all environments showing no statistically significant dependence. We further split galaxies into low-redshift (z ~ 0.8) and high-redshift (z ~ 1.05) subsamples and observe nearly identical behavior. We devise a simple toy model to explore possible star-formation histories (SFHs) for galaxies evolving between these redshifts. The key assumption in this model is that star-forming galaxies in a given environment-stellar mass bin can be described as a superposition of two exponential timescales (SFR ~ e^(-t/tau)): a long-tau timescale with tau = 4 Gyr to simulate "normal" star-forming galaxies, and a short-tau timescale with free tau (between 0.3 < tau/Gyr < 2) to simulate galaxies on a quenching trajectory. In general we find that galaxies residing in low/high environmental densities are more heavily weighted to the long-tau/short-tau pathways respectively, which we argue is a signature of environmental quenching. Furthermore, for intermediate-stellar mass galaxies this transition begins at intermediate-density environments suggesting that environmental quenching is relevant in group-like halos and/or cluster infall regions.