The Physical Origins of the Morphology-Density Relation: Evidence for Gas Stripping from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We provide a physical interpretation and explanation of the morphology-density relation for galaxies, drawing on stellar masses, star formation rates, axis ratios, and group halo masses from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We first re-cast the classical morphology-density relation in more quantitative terms, using low star formation rate (quiescence) as a proxy for early-type morphology and dark matter halo mass from a group catalog as a proxy for environmental density: for galaxies of a given stellar mass the quiescent fraction is found to increase with increasing dark matter halo mass. Our novel result is that—at a given stellar mass—quiescent galaxies are significantly flatter in dense environments, implying a higher fraction of disk galaxies. Supposing that the denser environments differ simply by a higher incidence of quiescent disk galaxies that are structurally similar to star-forming disk galaxies of similar mass, explains simultaneously and quantitatively these quiescence-environment and shape-environment relations. Our findings add considerable weight to the slow removal of gas as the main physical driver of the morphology-density relation, at the expense of other explanations.