Galaxy kinematics in the XMMU J2235-2557 cluster field at z ~ 1.4

Abstract

Aims. The relationship between baryonic and dark components in galaxies varies with the environment and cosmic time. Galaxy scaling relations describe strong trends between important physical properties. A very important quantitative tool in case of spiral galaxies is the Tully-Fisher relation (TFR), which combines the luminosity of the stellar population with the characteristic rotational velocity (V max ) taken as proxy for the total mass. In order to constrain galaxy evolution in clusters, we need measurements of the kinematic status of cluster galaxies at the starting point of the hierarchical assembly of clusters and the epoch when cosmic star formation peaks. Methods. We took spatially resolved slit FORS2 spectra of 19 cluster galaxies at z ∼ 1.4, and 8 additional field galaxies at 1 < z < 1.2 using the ESO Very Large Telescope. The targets were selected from previous spectroscopic and photometric campaigns as [OII] and H α emitters. Our spectroscopy was complemented with HST/ACS imaging in the F775W and F850LP filters, which is mandatory to derive the galaxy structural parameters accurately. We analyzed the ionized gas kinematics by extracting rotation curves from the two-dimensional spectra. Taking into account all geometrical, observational, and instrumental effects, we used these rotation curves to derive the intrinsic maximum rotation velocity. Results. V max was robustly determined for six cluster galaxies and three field galaxies. Galaxies with sky contamination or insufficient spatial rotation curve extent were not included in our analysis. We compared our sample to the local B-band TFR and the local velocitysize relation (VSR), finding that cluster galaxies are on average 1.6 magnitudes brighter and a factor 2-3 smaller. We tentatively divided our cluster galaxies by total mass (i.e., V max ) to investigate a possible mass dependency in the environmental evolution of galaxies. The averaged deviation from the local TFR is ∆M B = −0.7 for the high-mass subsample (V max > 200 km/s). This mild evolution may be driven by younger stellar populations (SP) of distant galaxies with respect to their local counterparts, and thus, an increasing luminosity is expected toward higher redshifts. However, the low-mass subsample (V max < 200 km/s) is made of highly overluminous galaxies that show ∆M B = −2.4 mag. When we repeated a similar analysis with the stellar mass TFR, we did not find significant offsets in our subsamples with respect to recent results at similar redshift. While the B-band TFR is sensitive to recent episodes of star formation, the stellar mass TFR tracks the overall evolution of the underlying stellar population. In order to understand the discrepancies between these two incarnations of the TFR, the reported B-band offsets can no longer be explained only by the gradual evolution of stellar populations with lookback time. We suspect that we instead see compact galaxies whose star formation was enhanced during their infall toward the dense regions of the cluster through interactions with the int...

Searching for environmental effects on galaxy kinematics in groups and clusters atz∼ 1 from the ORELSE survey

“…We have, moreover, repeated the same analysis by using the normalized scatter around the relation for only the rotation dominated galaxies, and we found that the conclusion is invariant. This result is consistent with past studies (e.g., Bösch et al 2013;Pérez-Martínez et al 2017) that have found no evidence of environmental effect on the smTFR.…”

“…A few works have studied the dependence of the TFR and smTFR on the environment. At z ≥ 0.1 some authors investigated the effects of the environment, defined as "cluster" or "field" (Bösch et al 2013;Pérez-Martínez et al 2017) or by local density (Pelliccia et al 2017), on the smTFR and found no variations in the relation. This may be a consequence of small sample of galaxies, especially in the higher density regions (i.e., cluster core or highest local overdensity).…”

The Tully-Fisher relation in dense groups at z ∼ 0.7 in the MAGIC survey

“…However, despite the new large samples presented above, studying the impact of environment on the TFR is not yet possible at intermediate redshift since very little is known about the density field in which those galaxies reside, due to incomplete spectroscopic coverage. Some studies have, however, targeted a few dozen galaxies in groups and (proto-)clusters at intermediate redshift with KMOS and FORS2 (e.g., Sobral et al 2013;Pérez-Martínez et al 2017;Böhm et al 2020). So far, the most complete study of the TFR as a function of environment has been performed from long-slit spectroscopy observations by Pelliccia et al (2019), using a sample of 94 galaxies at z ∼ 1, a fraction of which were members of clusters.…”

K-CLASH: Strangulation and ram pressure stripping in galaxy cluster members at 0.3 &lt; z &lt; 0.6

“…Current work has extended these observations to much higher redshifts, with studies of protoclusters and overdensities at redshifts between 1.5 < z < 2.5 becoming common (e.g. Muzzin et al 2013;Shimakawa et al 2015;Wang et al 2016b;Prichard et al 2017;Pérez-Martínez et al 2017;Böhm et al 2020; see Overzier 2016 for a review).…”