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Published December 2018 | Published
Journal Article Open

VIS^3COS - I. Survey overview and the role of environment and stellar mass on star formation

Abstract

We present the VIMOS Spectroscopic Survey of a Supercluster in the COSMOS field (VIS3COS) at z ∼ 0.84. We use VIMOS high-resolution spectra (GG475 filter) to spectroscopically select 490 galaxies in and around the superstructure and an additional 481 galaxies in the line of sight. We present the redshift distribution, the catalogue to be made public, and the first results on the properties of individual galaxies and stacked spectra (3500 Å < λ <  4200 Å rest-frame). We probe a wide range of densities and environments (from low-density field to clusters and rich groups). We find a decrease in the median star formation rate from low- to high-density environments in all bins of stellar mass and a sharp rise of the quenched fraction (from ∼10% to ∼40 − 60%) of intermediate-stellar-mass galaxies (10 <  log_(10) (M_⋆/M_⊙) <  10.75) from filaments to clusters. The quenched fraction for massive galaxies shows little dependence on environment, being constant at ∼30 − 40%. We find a break in the strength of the [O II] emission, with nearly constant line equivalent widths at lower densities (∼ − 11 Å) and then a drop to ∼ − 2.5 Å towards higher densities. The break in the [OII] line strength happens at similar densities (log_(10)(1 + δ) ∼ 0.0 − 0.5) as the observed rise in the quenched fraction. Our results may provide further clues regarding the different environmental processes affecting galaxies with different stellar masses and highlight the advantages of a single dataset in the COSMOS field probing a wide range of stellar masses and environments. We hypothesise that quenching mechanisms are enhanced in high-density regions.

Additional Information

© ESO 2018. Received 23 January 2018 / Accepted 18 May 2018. We thank the anonymous referee for making valuable suggestions, which helped to improve the paper. This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the research grant UID/FIS/04434/2013. APA, PhD::SPACE fellow, acknowledges support from the FCT through the fellowship PD/BD/52706/2014. DS acknowledges financial support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific research (NWO) through a Veni fellowship and from Lancaster University through an Early Career Internal Grant A100679. BD acknowledges financial support from NASA through the Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP), grant number NNX12AE20G, and the National Science Foundation, grant number 1716907. PNB is grateful for support from STFC via grant ST/M001229/1. This work was made possible by the use of the following PYTHON packages: NumPy & SciPy (Walt et al. 2011; Jones et al. 2001), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), and Astropy (Astropy Collaboration 2013).

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August 19, 2023
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