The effect of the environment on the stellar mass - size relation of present-day galaxies

María Cebrián, Ignacio Trujillo

Published 2014-04-28, updated 2014-07-11Version 3

To study how the environment can influence the relation between stellar mass and effective radius of nearby galaxies (z < 0.12), we use a mass-complete sample extracted from the NYU-Value Added Catalogue. This sample contains almost 232000 objects with masses up to $3\times10^{11}M_{\odot}$. For every galaxy in our sample, we explore the surrounding density within 2 Mpc using two different estimators of the environment. We find that galaxies tend to be larger in the field than in high density regions. This effect is more pronounced for late-type morphologies (~7.5% larger) and especially at low masses ($M < 2\times10^{10}M_{\odot}$), although early-type galaxies also show differences (~3.5%). The environment also leaves a subtle imprint in the scatter of the stellar mass-size relation. This scatter is larger in low density regions than in high density regions for both morphologies, on average ~3.5% larger for early-type and ~0.8% for late-type galaxies. Late-type galaxies with low masses ($M<2\times10^{10}M_{\odot}$) show the largest differences in the scatter among environments. The scatter is ~20% larger in the field than in clusters for these objects. Our analysis suggest that galaxies in clusters form earlier than those in the field. In addition, cluster galaxies seem to be originated from a more homogeneous family of progenitors.