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The massive survey VII: the relationship of angular momentum, stellar mass and environment of early-type galaxies

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DOIResolve DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stx1639
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Affiliation
  1. National Research Council of Canada. Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics
FormatText, Article
Subjectastrophysics of galaxies (astro-ph.GA); cosmology and nongalactic astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)
Abstract
We analyse the environmental properties of 370 local early-type galaxies (ETGs) in the MASSIVE and ATLAS3D surveys, two complementary volume-limited integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) galaxy surveys spanning absolute -band magnitude, or stellar mass. We find these galaxies to reside in a diverse range of environments measured by four methods: group membership (whether a galaxy is a brightest group/cluster galaxy, satellite, or isolated), halo mass, large-scale mass density (measured over a few Mpc), and local mass density (measured within the th neighbour). The spatially resolved IFS stellar kinematics provide robust measurements of the spin parameter and enable us to examine the relationship among, and galaxy environment. We find a strong correlation between and where the average decreases from to below 0.1 with increasing mass, and the fraction of slow rotators increases from % to 90%. We show for the first time that at fixed, there are almost no trends between galaxy spin and environment; the apparent kinematic morphology-density relation for ETGs is therefore primarily driven by and is accounted for by the joint correlations between and spin, and between and environment. A possible exception is that the increased at high local density is slightly more than expected based only on these joint correlations. Our results suggest that the physical processes responsible for building up the present-day stellar masses of massive galaxies are also very efficient at reducing their spin, in any environment.
Publication date
PublisherOxford University Press
The Royal Astronomical Society
In
  • Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society 471, no. 2 (29 June 2017): 1428–1445.
LanguageEnglish
Peer reviewedYes
NPARC number23002194
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Record identifier547af9e0-c348-45b5-bf89-98988bbd145a
Record created2017-08-31
Record modified2021-04-26
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