The Compactness of Galaxy Groups in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Abstract

Abstract We use an updated version of the halo-based galaxy group catalog of Yang et al., and take the surface brightness of the galaxy group (μ lim) based on projected positions and luminosities of galaxy members as a compactness proxy to divide groups into subsystems with different compactness. By comparing various properties, including galaxy conditional luminosity function, stellar population, active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity, and X-ray luminosity of the intracluster medium of carefully controlled high (HC) and low compactness (LC) group samples, we find that group compactness plays an essential role in characterizing the detailed physical properties of the group themselves and their group members, especially for low-mass groups with M h ≲ 1013.5 h −1 M ⊙. We find that the low-mass HC groups have a systematically lower magnitude gap Δm 12 and X-ray luminosity than their LC counterparts, indicating that the HC groups are probably in the early stage of group merging. On the other hand, a higher fraction of passive galaxies is found in the HC group, which however is a result of systematically smaller halo-centric distance distribution of their satellite population. After controlling for both M h and halo-centric distance, we did not find any differences in both the quenching fraction and AGN activity of the member galaxies between the HC and LC groups. Therefore, we conclude that the halo quenching effect, which results in the halo-centric dependence of a galaxy population, is a faster process compared to the dynamical relaxed timescale of galaxy groups.