Nature vs. Nurture: Revisiting the environmental impact on star formation activities of galaxies

TL;DR

This study analyzes how environment influences galaxy star formation across redshifts, revealing that mass-driven processes dominate at all epochs, with environmental effects varying over cosmic time.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of environmental impacts on galaxy star formation up to redshift 4, highlighting the dominance of mass quenching over environmental quenching.

Findings

At z<1, SFR decreases with environment for all galaxies but is environment-independent for star-forming ones.

At z>2, a positive correlation exists between SFR and environment for all galaxies.

Massive galaxies are primarily quenched by their high stellar mass across all redshifts.

Abstract

We present a systematic study of the environmental impact on star formation activities of galaxies using a mass-complete sample of $\sim$170k galaxies at $z<4$ from the latest COSMOS2020 catalog. At $z<1$, we find that the mean star-formation rate (SFR) of all galaxies decreases with increasing density of the environment. However when we consider only star-forming galaxies, the mean SFR becomes independent of the environment at $z<1$. At $z>2$ we observe a clear positive correlation between the SFR and density of the environment for all the galaxies. On the other hand, stellar mass of the galaxies increases significantly with the environments at all redshifts except for star-forming galaxies at $z<1$. The fraction of quiescent galaxies increases with increasing density of environment at $z<2$, and the ``morphology-density'' relation is confirmed to be present up to $z\sim1$. We also find that environmental quenching is negligible at $z>1$, whereas mass quenching is the dominant quenching mechanism for massive galaxies at all redshifts. Based on these results, we argue that stellar mass regulated physical processes might be the major driving force for star formation activities of galaxies. At low redshift ($z<1$) massive galaxies are quenched primarily due to their high mass, resulting in a normal ``SFR-density'' relation. At high redshift ($z>2$) most of the galaxies are star-forming ones tightly following the star-forming main sequence, and the difference in their stellar mass at different environments naturally leads to a reversal of ``SFR-density'' relation.