Impact of cosmic web on galaxy properties and their correlations: Insights from Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

We use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyze a volume-limited sample from the SDSS and explore how cosmic web environments affect the interrelations between various galaxy properties, such as $(u-r)$ colour, stellar mass, specific star formation rate, metallicity, morphology, and $D4000$. Our analysis reveals that the first three principal components (PC1, PC2 and PC3) account for approximately $85\%$ of the data variance. We classify galaxies into different cosmic web environments based on the eigenvalues of the deformation tensor and compare PC1, PC2, PC3 across these environments. PC1 is dominated by colour, sSFR, D4000, and morphology. It displays clear bimodality across all cosmic web environments, with sheets and clusters showing distinct preferences for negative and positive PC1 values, respectively. This variation reflects the strong role of environmental processes in regulating star formation. PC2 and PC3, respectively show positively and negatively skewed unimodal distributions in all environments. PC2 is primarily influenced by metallicity whereas PC3 is dominated by stellar mass. It indicates that metallicity evolves gradually and is less sensitive to environmental extremes. PC3 likely captures residual variation in stellar mass. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test confirms that the distributions of PC1, PC2 and PC3 differ significantly across environments, with a confidence level exceeding $99.99\%$. Furthermore, we calculate the normalized mutual information (NMI) between the principal components and individual galaxy properties within different cosmic web environments. A two-tailed t-test reveals that for each relationship and each pair of environments, the null hypothesis is rejected with a confidence level $>99.99\%$. Our analysis confirms that cosmic web environments play a significant role in shaping the correlations between galaxy properties.

30 pages, 10 figures, 10 tables, included results for PC3 and expanded the discussion with new interpretations, Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Computing

References in corpus (45)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The propagation of uncertainties in stellar population synthesis modeling I: The relevance of uncertain aspects of stellar evolution and the IMF to the derived physical properties of galaxies
• A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies: I. Galaxy Mergers & Quasar Activity
• Simba: Cosmological Simulations with Black Hole Growth and Feedback
• Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment
• Galaxy Pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey I: Star Formation, AGN Fraction, and the Luminosity/Mass-Metallicity Relation
• The Evolution of Dark Matter Halo Properties in Clusters, Filaments, Sheets and Voids
• Strangulation in Galaxy Groups
• The Eighteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: Targeting and First Spectra from SDSS-V
• Minor Galaxy Interactions: Star Formation Rates and Galaxy Properties
• Star Formation in Close Pairs Selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Starbursts triggered by inter-galactic tides and interstellar compressive turbulence
• Mapping galaxy encounters in numerical simulations: The spatial extent of induced star formation
• A parsec-resolution simulation of the Antennae galaxies: Formation of star clusters during the merger
• The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS): Galaxy segregation inside filaments at $z\simeq 0.7$
• Tidally Triggered Star Formation in Close Pairs of Galaxies: Major and Minor Interactions
• Angular momentum-Large-scale structure alignments in LCDM models and the SDSS
• Cosmic Web and Star Formation Activity in Galaxies at z~1
• From voids to filaments: environmental transformations of galaxies in the SDSS
• The Alignments of the Galaxy Spins with the Real-Space Tidal Field Reconstructed from the Two Mass Redshift Survey
• Spatially resolved star formation and fuelling in galaxy interactions
• The environmental dependence of the chemical properties of star-forming galaxies
• Disk Growth and Quenching
• An EAGLE view of the missing baryons
• The impact of the connectivity of the cosmic web on the physical properties of galaxies at its nodes
• The merger-starburst connection across cosmic times
• The Imprint of Cosmic Web Quenching on Central Galaxies
• Extremely Metal-Poor Galaxies: The Environment
• The role of the cosmic web in the scatter of the galaxy stellar mass - gas metallicity relation
• The ALMaQUEST Survey X: What powers merger induced star formation?
• How much a galaxy knows about its large-scale environment?: An information theoretic perspective
• Investigating the Effect of Galaxy Interactions on Star Formation at 0.5<z<3.0
• The boundary of cosmic filaments
• Cosmic filaments delay quenching inside clusters
• Study of galaxies on large-scale filaments in simulations
• Brightest group galaxies and the large-scale environment
• Exploring star formation using the filaments in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Five (SDSS DR5)
• Death at watersheds: galaxy quenching in low-density environments
• The luminosity bias relation from filaments in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release Four
• Galaxy interactions in filaments and sheets: effects of the large-scale structures versus the local density
• Do minor interactions trigger star formation in galaxy pairs?
• The correlations between galaxy properties in different environments of the cosmic web
• The maximum extent of the filaments and sheets in the cosmic web: an analysis of the SDSS DR17
• Red riding on hood: Exploring how galaxy colour depends on environment
• The roles of environment and interactions on the evolution of red and blue galaxies in the EAGLE simulation

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Tracing correlations between galaxy properties across the Cosmic Web: An IllustrisTNG-based study