Cosmic Web and Star Formation Activity in Galaxies at z~1 [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.7695


We investigate the role of the delineated cosmic web/filaments on the star formation activity by exploring a sample of 425 narrow-band selected H{\alpha} emitters, as well as 2846 color-color selected underlying star-forming galaxies for a large scale structure (LSS) at z=0.84 in the COSMOS field from the HiZELS survey. Using the scale-independent Multi-scale Morphology Filter (MMF) algorithm, we are able to quantitatively describe the density field and disentangle it into its major components: fields, filaments and clusters. We show that the observed median star formation rate (SFR), stellar mass, specific star formation rate (sSFR), the mean SFR-Mass relation and its scatter for both H{\alpha} emitters and underlying star-forming galaxies do not strongly depend on different classes of environment, in agreement with previous studies. However, the fraction of H{\alpha} emitters varies with environment and is enhanced in filamentary structures at z~1. We propose mild galaxy-galaxy interactions as the possible physical agent for the elevation of the fraction of H{\alpha} star-forming galaxies in filaments. Our results show that filaments are the likely physical environments which are often classed as the “intermediate” densities, and that the cosmic web likely plays a major role in galaxy formation and evolution which has so far been poorly investigated.

Read this paper on arXiv…

B. Darvish, D. Sobral, B. Mobasher, et. al.
Tue, 30 Sep 14
3/81

Comments: 15 pages, 11 figures, Accepted for publication in the ApJ