The correlations between galaxy properties in different environments of the cosmic web

TL;DR

This study investigates how galaxy properties such as color, mass, star formation rate, and metallicity are correlated in different cosmic web environments, revealing environment-dependent variations in these relations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to classify galaxy environments using the tidal tensor eigenvalues and analyzes property correlations across these environments, highlighting environment influence.

Findings

Correlations differ significantly across environments

Null hypothesis rejected at >99.99% significance

Galaxy property relations are environment-dependent

Abstract

We study the correlations between $(u-r)$ colour, stellar mass, specific star formation rate (sSFR) and metallicity of galaxies in different geometric environments of the cosmic web using a volume limited sample from the SDSS. The geometric environment at the location of each galaxy is determined using the eigenvalues of the tidal tensor in three dimensions. We use the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) and the normalized mutual information (NMI) to quantify the correlations between these galaxy properties in sheets, filaments and clusters after matching the stellar mass distributions of the galaxies in these environments. A two-tailed t-test assesses the statistical significance of the observed differences between these relations in different geometric environments. The null hypothesis can be rejected at $>99.99\%$ significance level in most of the cases, suggesting that the scaling relations between the observable galaxy properties are susceptible to the geometric environments of the cosmic web.