The Effect of Environment on the Ultraviolet Color-Magnitude Relation of Early-Type Galaxies
/ Authors
K. Schawinski, S. Kaviraj, S. Khochfar, Suk-Jin Yoon, Suk-Jin Yoon, Sukyoung K. Yi, Sukyoung K. Yi, J. Deharveng, A. Boselli, T. Barlow
and 18 more authors
T. Conrow, K. Forster, P. Friedman, D. C. Martin, P. Morrissey, S. Neff, D. Schiminovich, M. Seibert, T. Small, T. Wyder, L. Bianchi, J. Donas, T. Heckman, Young-Wook Lee, B. Madore, B. Milliard, R. Rich, A. Szalay
/ Abstract
We use GALEX near-UV (NUV) photometry of a sample of early-type galaxies selected in the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) to study the UV color-magnitude relation (CMR). NUV − r color is an excellent tracer of even small amounts (~1% mass fraction) of recent (≲1 Gyr) star formation, and so the NUV − r CMR allows us to study the effect of environment on the recent star formation history. We analyze a volume-limited sample of 839 visually inspected early-type galaxies in the redshift range 0.05 < z < 0.10 brighter than Mr of –21.5 with any possible emission-line or radio-selected active galactic nuclei (AGNs) removed to avoid contamination. We find that contamination by AGN candidates and late-type interlopers highly bias any study of recent star formation in early-type galaxies and that, after removing those, our lower limit to the fraction of massive early-type galaxies showing signs of recent star formation is roughly 30% ± 3% . This suggests that residual star formation is common even among the present day early-type galaxy population. We find that the fraction of UV-bright early-type galaxies is 25% higher in low-density environments. However, the density effect is clear only in the lowest density bin. The blue galaxy fraction for the subsample of the brightest early-type galaxies, however, shows a very strong density dependence, in the sense that the blue galaxy fraction is lower in a higher density region.
Journal: The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
DOI: 10.1086/516631