Environmental dependence of SFRs in late-type GAMA galaxies

• Published in: Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 2011-09, Vol.7 (S284), p.352-356
• Main Authors: Grootes, Meiert W., Tuffs, Richard J., Andrae, Ellen, Kelvin, Lee S., Liske, Jochen, Madore, Barry F., Popescu, Cristina C., Robotham, Aaron S. G., Seibert, Mark, Taylor, Edward N.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Astronomy; Astrophysics; Contributed Papers; Cosmology; Stars & galaxies
• ISSN: 1743-9213; 1743-9221
• DOI: 10.1017/S1743921312009404

Present and past gas-fuelling of galaxies is expected to depend upon both the properties of the galaxies themselves, as well as their larger-scale environments. In the case of galaxies in groups the environment, i.e the group mass, can be probed by measuring the velocity dispersion of the group members, as done with the GAMA Galaxy Group catalogue (Robotham et al. 2011), probing the halo mass function all the way to small groups. The gas-fuelling rate of normal late-type galaxies can be traced by the SFR under the assumption of a steady state between gas-fuelling and gas-consumption by SF. We present a method to estimate disk opacities from UV/optical photometric characteristics, calibrated using the radiative transfer model of Popescu et al. (2011), applied to UV-Opt-FIR GAMA/H-ATLAS photometry for a subset of GAMA galaxies. We use the method to extract attenuation corrected SFRs for a large sample of late-type GAMA galaxies, which we use in an initial application to constrain the dependency of star formation/gas-fuelling in late-type galaxies on mass of parent DMH, and compactness of galaxy group.