Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): The environmental impact on SFR and metallicity in galaxy groups.
2021
We present a study of the relationships and environmental dependencies
between stellar mass, star formation rate, and gas metallicity for more than
700 galaxies in groups up to redshift 0.35 from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly
(GAMA) survey. To identify the main drivers, our sample was analyzed as a
function of group-centric distance, projected galaxy number density, and
stellar mass. By using control samples of more than 16000 star-forming field
galaxies and volume limited samples, we find that the highest enhancement in
SFR (0.3 dex) occurs in galaxies with the lowest local density. In contrast to
previous work, our data show small enhancements of $\sim$0.1 dex in SFR for
galaxies at the highest local densities or group-centric distances. Our data
indicates quenching in SFR only for massive galaxies, suggesting that stellar
mass might be the main driver of quenching processes for star forming galaxies.
We can discard a morphological driven quenching, since the S\'ersic index
distribution for group and control galaxies are similar. The gas metallicity
does not vary drastically. It increases $\sim$0.08 dex for galaxies at the
highest local densities, and decreases for galaxies at the highest
group-centric distances, in agreement with previous work. Altogether, the local
density, rather than group-centric distance, shows the stronger impact in
enhancing both, the SFR and gas metallicity. We applied the same methodology to
galaxies from the IllustrisTNG simulations, and although we were able to
reproduce the general observational trends, the differences between group and
control samples only partially agree with the observations
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