2016/11/30 by Biswajit Pandey, Suman Sarkar · 36 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Artificial intelligence #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy formation and evolution #Perspective (graphical) #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scale (ratio) #Statistical physics #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slw250
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters 467(1), L6-L10 (Oxford University Press) · 6 pages, 1 figure, minor revision, Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters
arxiv created 2016/12/09 · openalex publication_date 2016/12/12 · arxiv updated 2016/12/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The small-scale environment characterized by the local density is known to play a crucial role in deciding the galaxy properties but the role of large-scale environment on galaxy formation and evolution still remain a less clear issue. We propose an information theoretic framework to investigate the influence of large-scale environment on galaxy properties and apply it to the data from the Galaxy Zoo project which provides the visual morphological classifications of ∼ 1 million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We find a non-zero mutual information between morphology and environment which decreases with increasing length scales but persists throughout the entire length scales probed. We estimate the conditional mutual information and the interaction information between morphology and environment by conditioning the environment on different length scales and find a synergic interaction between them which operates upto at least a length scales of ∼ 30 h-1 \rm Mpc. Our analysis indicates that these interactions largely arise due to the mutual information shared between the environments on different length scales.