To study the role of environment in galaxy evolution, we reconstruct the underlying density field of galaxies based on COSMOS2020 (The Farmer catalog) and provide the density catalog for a magnitude-limited (Ks < 24.5) sample of ∼210,000 galaxies at 0.4 < z < 5 within the COSMOS field. The environmental densities are calculated using a weighted kernel density estimation approach with the choice of a von Mises–Fisher kernel, an analog of the Gaussian kernel for periodic data. Additionally, we make corrections for the edge effect and masked regions in the field. We utilize physical properties extracted by LePhare to investigate the connection between star formation activity and the environmental density of galaxies in six mass-complete subsamples at different cosmic epochs within 0.4 < z < 4. Our findings confirm a strong anticorrelation between star formation rate (SFR)/specific SFR (sSFR) and environmental density out to z ∼ 1.1. At 1.1 < z < 2, there is no significant correlation between SFR/sSFR and density. At 2 < z < 4, we observe a reversal of the SFR/sSFR–density relation such that both SFR and sSFR increase by a factor of ∼10 with increasing density contrast, δ, from −0.4 to 5. This observed reversal at higher redshifts supports the scenario where an increased availability of gas supply, along with tidal interactions and a generally higher star formation efficiency in dense environments, could potentially enhance star formation activity in galaxies located in rich environments at z > 2.
Large-scale Structures in COSMOS2020: Evolution of Star Formation Activity in Different Environments at 0.4 < z < 4
- Creators
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Taamoli, Sina
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Mobasher, Bahram
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Chartab, Nima
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Darvish, Behnam
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Weaver, John R.
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Hemmati, Shoubaneh
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Casey, Caitlin M.
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Sattari, Zahra
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Brammer, Gabriel
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Capak, Peter L.1
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Ilbert, Olivier
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Kartaltepe, Jeyhan S.
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McCracken, Henry J.
- Moneti, Andrea
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Sanders, David B.
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Scoville, Nicholas1
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Steinhardt, Charles L.
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Toft, Sune
Abstract
Copyright and License
© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to the anonymous referee for the helpful comments that greatly improved the quality of this work. Some of the data used in this study were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to acknowledge the profound cultural role of Maunakea's summit within the indigenous Hawaiian community. This work is based on data products from observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under ESO program ID 179.A-2005 and on data products produced by CALET and the Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit on behalf of the UltraVISTA consortium. This work is based in part on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained from the Data Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. This research has also made use of the zCOSMOS database, operated at CeSAM/LAM, Marseille, France. S.T. was partially supported by NSF award 2206813 during this work.
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 1538-4357
- DOI
- 10.3847/1538-4357/ad32c5
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NAS 5-26555
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2206813
- Caltech groups
- Astronomy Department, Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)