Observational evidence of the large-scale environmental influence on dwarf galaxy evolution

Abstract

We investigate how the cosmic environment affects galaxy evolution in the Universe by studying gas-phase chemical abundances and other galaxy properties as a function of the large-scale environment and local density of galaxies. Using spectroscopic observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7, we estimate the oxygen and nitrogen abundances of 993 star-forming void dwarf galaxies and 759 star-forming dwarf galaxies in denser regions. We use the Direct Te method for calculating the gas-phase chemical abundances in the dwarf galaxies because it is best suited for low metallicity, low mass galaxies. A substitute for the [OII] 3727 doublet is developed, permitting oxygen abundance estimates of SDSS dwarf galaxies at all redshifts with the Direct Te method. We find that star-forming void dwarf galaxies have slightly higher oxygen abundances than star-forming dwarf galaxies in denser environments, but we find that void dwarf galaxies have slightly lower nitrogen abundances and lower N/O ratios than galaxies in denser regions. At smaller scales, we find that only the presence of a neighboring galaxy within 0.05 Mpc/h or 0.1 r_virial, or the presence of a group within 0.05 Mpc/h, influences a dwarf galaxy's evolution. Dwarf galaxies within 0.05 Mpc/h or 0.1 r_virial of another galaxy tend to be bluer, have higher sSFRs, have higher oxygen abundances, and have lower N/O ratios than average. In contrast, galaxies within 0.05 Mpc/h of the center of the closest group have lower oxygen and nitrogen abundances than average. We also investigate how a galaxy transitions through the color-magnitude diagram, evolving from a blue, star-forming spiral or irregular galaxy in the blue sequence to a red elliptical galaxy in the red cloud through the green valley. We discover that combining a galaxy's color, color gradient, and inverse concentration index determines a galaxy's location on the color-magnitude diagram. The results indicate that, in the green valley, there is a lower fraction of void dwarf galaxies than dwarf galaxies in denser regions. From these analyses, we surmise that void dwarf galaxies experience delayed star formation as predicted by the Lambda CDM cosmology. We also conjecture that cosmic downsizing corresponds to a shift towards star formation in both lower mass objects and void regions closer to the present epoch. We present evidence that void dwarf galaxies may have a higher ratio of dark matter halo mass to stellar mass when compared to dwarf galaxies in denser environments.%%%%Ph.D., Physics – Drexel University, 2017