The Overdensities of Galaxy Environments as a Function of Luminosity and Color

Abstract

We study the mean environments of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) as a function of rest-frame luminosity and color. Overdensities in galaxy number are estimated in 8 and 1 h -1 Mpc spheres centered on 115,000 galaxies taken from the SDSS spectroscopic sample. We find that, at constant color, overdensity is independent of luminosity for galaxies with the blue colors of spirals. This suggests that at fixed star formation history, spiral-galaxy mass is a very weak function of environment. Overdensity does depend on luminosity for galaxies with the red colors of early types; both low-luminosity and high-luminosity red galaxies are found to be in highly overdense regions.