SDSS-IV MaNGA: the environmental effects on some fundamental properties of early-type galaxies

Abstract

We studied the dependence of selected structural and kinematic properties of early-type galaxies (ETGs) on their environments. The selected sample, extracted from the SDSS-DR17 MaNGA survey, consists of 946 ETGs in clusters (cETGs) and 288 isolated ETGs (iETGs) within a spectroscopic redshift \(z\leq 0.15\). We investigated the distribution of these galaxies in the Fundamental Plane (FP), Kormendy Relation (KR), Faber-Jackson Relation (FJR) and the Mass-Size Relation (MSR). We found that massive galaxies, whose stellar masses \(M_{*}> 10^{11}M_{\odot }\), are predominantly elliptical (\(>65\%\)). The analysis of the four scaling relations showed that the effect of the host environment is negligible for massive (\(M_{*}>10^{11.5}M_{\odot }\)) ETGs, most likely because of their passive evolution through dry mergers and/or stellar aging. On the other hand, low-mass ETGs are influenced by their environment, where iETGs with \(M_{*}<10^{10}M_{\odot }\) and velocity dispersion \(\sigma _{0}\leq 100\) km/sec are \(25\%\) more luminous and \(11.5\%\) larger than cETGs. Low-mass cETGs may have suffered processes that removed their gas content and hence quenched star formation while low-mass iETGs may have experienced a recent wet merger that triggered star formation and led to their, currently, observed low mass-to-light ratio. However, further spectral analysis is needed to confirm these findings.