The roles of environment and interactions on the evolution of red and blue galaxies in the EAGLE simulation

Apashanka Das, Biswajit Pandey

Published 2024-02-08Version 1

We study the evolution of the red and blue galaxies from $z=3$ to $z=0$ using the EAGLE simulation. The galaxies in the blue cloud and the red sequence are separated at each redshift using a scheme based on Otsu's method. Our analysis shows that the two populations have small differences in the local density and the clustering strength until $z=2$, after which the red galaxies preferentially occupy the denser regions and exhibit a significantly stronger clustering than the blue galaxies. The large differences in the cold gas mass and the star formation rate (SFR) of the two populations before $z=2$ indicate that the dichotomy between the two populations may not arise due to the environment alone. The galaxy pairs at each redshift show a significantly higher SFR than the isolated control galaxies within pair separations $<200$ kpc. The SFR of the paired galaxies at a given separation declines with the decreasing redshift, indicating a gradual depletion of their cold gas reservoir. At smaller pair separations, an anomalous increase of the SFR in paired galaxies around $z \sim 2$, suggests that the environmental effects start to dominate at this redshift, increasing the rate of galaxy interactions and the occurrence of starburst galaxies. We observe a substantial decrease in the blue fraction in paired galaxies starting from $z=1$ to the present. The decrease in the blue fraction is mild for the paired galaxies with their second nearest neighbour at a distance $>500$ kpc.