The environmental dependence of gas accretion on to galaxies: quenching satellites through starvation

van de Voort, Freeke ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6301-638X, Bahé, Yannick M., Bower, Richard G., Correa, Camila A., Crain, Robert A., Schaye, Joop and Theuns, Tom 2017. The environmental dependence of gas accretion on to galaxies: quenching satellites through starvation. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 466 (3) , pp. 3460-3471. 10.1093/mnras/stw3356

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Abstract

Galaxies that have fallen into massive haloes may no longer be able to accrete gas from their surroundings: a process referred to as ‘starvation’ or ‘strangulation’ of satellites. We study the environmental dependence of gas accretion on to galaxies using the cosmological, hydrodynamical EAGLE simulation. We quantify the dependence of gas accretion on stellar mass, redshift, and environment, using halo mass and galaxy overdensity as environmental indicators. We find a strong suppression, of many orders of magnitude, of the gas accretion rate in dense environments, primarily for satellite galaxies. This suppression becomes stronger at lower redshift. However, the scatter in accretion rates is very large for satellites. This is (at least in part) due to the variation in the halocentric radius, since gas accretion is more suppressed at smaller radii. Central galaxies are influenced less strongly by their environment and exhibit less scatter in their gas accretion rates. The star formation rates of both centrals and satellites show similar behaviour to their gas accretion rates. The relatively small differences between gas accretion and star formation rates demonstrate that galaxies generally exhaust their gas reservoir somewhat faster at higher stellar mass, lower redshift, and in denser environments. We conclude that the environmental suppression of gas accretion could directly result in the quenching of star formation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0035-8711
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 March 2020
Date of Acceptance:	21 December 2016
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 12:14
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/130247

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