The CFHT Legacy Survey: The Morphology-Density Relation of Galaxies out to Z~1

Abstract

We study the relationships between galaxy total luminosity (M_g), morphology, color and environment as a function of redshift. We use a magnitude-limited sample of 65,624 galaxies in the redshift range 0<z<1.3 taken from one of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey Deep Fields. We parametrize galaxy morphology according to the Sersic index n. Our n>2 number fractions at z=0.1 agree well with those based on SDSS galaxies. We find that the n>2 galaxy number fraction is constant with redshift in the field. However, for overdense environments this fraction is larger and increases towards lower redshifts, higher densities and higher luminosities. Rest-frame color-magnitude diagrams show that the color distribution is bimodal out to our redshift limit of z~1 with a prominent red-sequence of galaxies at 0.2<z<0.4 and a large blue-peak dominance at 0.8<z<1. We use this bimodality to define a red galaxy fraction (rest-frame u-g>1). For all environments, this fraction increases towards lower redshifts and higher luminosities. The red fraction within cluster-like regions changes 60% faster with redshift as compared to the field for M_g<-19.5. Using, for the first time, observations across many cluster-field interfaces distributed over a single, large volume, we trace the large-scale morphology-density relation and the Butcher-Oemler effect over a period of almost 8 Gyr.

Accepted by ApJ

Cited by in corpus (20)

• A Cosmological Framework for the Co-Evolution of Quasars, Supermassive Black Holes, and Elliptical Galaxies: II. Formation of Red Ellipticals
• The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: The Role of Galaxy Environment in the Cosmic Star-Formation History
• MegaPipe: the MegaCam image stacking pipeline at the Canadian Astronomical Data Centre
• The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: Evolution of the Color-Density Relation at 0.4 < z < 1.35
• The VIMOS VLT Deep Survey: The build-up of the colour-density relation
• The zCOSMOS Redshift Survey: the role of environment and stellar mass in shaping the rise of the morphology-density relation from z~1
• The DEEP2 galaxy redshift survey: the evolution of the blue fraction in groups and the field
• The Dependence of the Mass Assembly History of Cold Dark Matter Halos on Environment
• Deconstructing the Galaxy Stellar Mass Function with UKIDSS and CANDELS: the Impact of Colour, Structure and Environment
• Galaxy morphology, kinematics and clustering in a hydrodynamic simulation of a LambdaCDM universe
• The Complex Structure of the Cl 1604 Supercluster at z~0.9
• Morphological Fractions of Galaxies in WINGS Clusters: revisiting the Morphology-Density Paradigm
• The Effect of Local Galaxy Surface Density on Star Formation for HI selected galaxies
• Individual and Group Galaxies in CNOC1 clusters
• Evidence for Morphology and Luminosity Transformation of Galaxies at High Redshifts
• Dependence of Galaxy Shape on Environment in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The ESO Nearby Abell Cluster Survey IX. The morphology-radius and morphology-density relations in rich galaxy clusters
• The ESO-Spitzer Imaging extragalactic Survey (ESIS) II: VIMOS I,z wide field imaging of ELAIS-S1 and selection of distant massive galaxies
• The Size Function of Galaxy Disks out to z ~ 1 from the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope Legacy Survey
• Astrophysics in 2005