Combined Effects of Galaxy Interactions and Large-scale Environment on Galaxy Properties

We inspect the coupled dependence of physical parameters of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies on the small-scale (distance to and morphology of the nearest neighbor galaxy) and the large-scale (background density smoothed over 20 nearby galaxies) environments. The impacts of interaction on galaxy properties are detected at least out to the neighbor separation corresponding to the virial radius of galaxies, which is typically between 200 and 400 h kpc for the galaxies in our sample. To detect these long-range interaction effects it is crucial to divide galaxy interactions into four cases dividing the morphology of target and neighbor galaxies into early and late types. We show that there are two characteristic neighbor-separation scales where the galaxy interactions cause abrupt changes in the properties of galaxies. The first scale is the virial radius of the nearest neighbor galaxy rvir,nei. Many physical parameters start to deviate from those of extremely isolated galaxies at the projected neighbor separation rp of about rvir,nei. The second scale is at rp ≈ 0.05rvir,nei = 10− 20h −1 kpc, and is the scale at which the galaxies in pairs start to merge. We find that late-type neighbors enhance the star formation activity of galaxies while early-type neighbors reduce it, and that these effects occur within rvir,nei. The hot halo gas and cold disk gas must be participating in the interactions at separations less than the virial radius of the galaxy plus dark halo system. Our results also show that the role of the large-scale density in determining galaxy properties is minimal once luminosity and morphology are fixed. We propose that the weak residual dependence of galaxy properties on the large-scale density is due to the dependence of the halo gas property on the large-scale density. Subject headings: galaxies:general – galaxies:formation – galaxies:evolution – galaxies:morphology – galaxies:properties