UV-IR luminosity functions and stellar mass functions of galaxies in the Shapley supercluster core

Abstract

We present a panchromatic study of luminosity functions (LFs) and stellar mass functions (SMFs) of galaxies in the core of the Shapley supercluster at z=0.048, in order to investigate how the dense environment affects the galaxy properties, such as star formation (SF) or stellar mass. We find that, while the faint-end slope of optical and NIR LFs steepens with decreasing density, no environment effect is found in the slope of the SMFs. This suggests thatmechanisms transforming galaxies in different environments are mainly related to the quench of SF rather than to mass-loss. The Near-UV (NUV) and Far-UV (FUV) LFs obtained have steeper faint-end slopes than the local field population, while the 24 and 70μm galaxy LFs for the Shapley supercluster have shapes fully consistent with those obtained for the local field galaxy population. This apparent lack of environmental dependence for the infrared (IR) LFs suggests that the bulk of the star-forming galaxies that make up the observed cluster IR LF have been recently accreted from the field and have yet to have their SF activity significantly affected by the cluster environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.