How much a galaxy knows about its large-scale environment?: An information theoretic perspective

Abstract

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 $\sim 1$ 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 $\sim 30h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$. Our analysis indicates that these interactions largely arise due to the mutual information shared between the environments on different length scales.

6 pages, 1 figure, minor revision, Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Cosmic Web of Galaxies in the COSMOS Field: Public Catalog and Different Quenching for Centrals and Satellites
• Large-scale environments of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies
• Does information entropy play a role in the expansion and acceleration of the Universe?
• How the Coherent Tides Obstruct the Radial Infalls of Satellite Galaxies onto Clusters
• Alignment of the central galaxies with the environment