2025/01/02 by Yun Zheng, Zheng, Yun, Kun Xu +11
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #History and Developments in Astronomy
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.00986
Star formation quenching in galaxies is a critical process in galaxy formation. It is widely believed that the quenching process is dominated by the mass of galaxies and/or their environment. In Paper V, we addressed the challenge to disentangle the effects of mass and environment by employing the PAC method, which combines spectroscopic and deep photometric surveys. This approach enabled us to measure the excess surface density of blue and red galaxies around massive central galaxies down to 109.0M\odot. However, it is not straightforward to completely separate the two effects. To address this issue, in this paper, we derive the average quenched fraction of central (isolated) galaxies, fqcen(M*), by combining the 3D quenched fraction distribution fsatq(r; M*,cen, M*,sat), reconstructed from the n2wp(rp) measurements, with the stellar mass-halo mass relation in N-body simulations from Paper IV, and the observed total quenched fraction, fqall(M*). Using fsatq(r;M*,cen,M*,sat), fqcen(M*), and the galaxy-halo connection, we assign a quenched probability to each (sub)halo in the simulation, enabling a comprehensive study of galaxy quenching. We find that the mass-quenched fraction increases from 0.3 to 0.87 across the stellar mass range [109.5, 1011.0]M\odot, while the environmental quenched fraction decreases from 0.17 to 0.03. The mass effect dominates galaxy quenching across the entire stellar mass range we studied. Moreover, more massive host halos are more effective at quenching their satellite galaxies, while satellite stellar mass has minimal influence on environmental quenching.