Exploring the Interplay Between Star Formation and Active Galactic Nuclei and the Role of Environment in Galaxy Evolution

Book excerpt: One of the central goals of extragalactic astronomy is to understand how galaxies grow their stellar mass and central black holes, the connection between star formation and active galactic nuclei (AGN), and the impact of environment on this growth. In this thesis, I utilize multiwavelength surveys that are both deep and wide, advanced computational codes that model the spectral energy distributions of galaxies with and without AGN, as well as state-of-the-art simulations of galaxy evolution in order to explore how galaxy properties are impacted by their surrounding environment and AGN activity. These studies explore galaxies over a redshift range of 0.015 z 0.023 (lookback time of ~ 0.2 to ~ 0.3 Gyr), and over a redshift range of 0.5 z 3.0 (lookback time of ~ 5 to ~ 12 Gyr). The large-area surveys used here provide some of the largest and most statistically robust samples to-date of rare massive galaxies (with stellar mass M [subscript *] 1011 M☉) and extremely luminous AGN (with X-ray luminosity L [subscript X] 1044 erg s−1) out to z ~ 3, thereby limiting the effects of cosmic variance and Poisson statistics. I analyze the observed stellar masses and star formation rates of galaxies as a function of environment and AGN activity, compare the empirical results to theoretical models of galaxy evolution, and discuss the implications of such comparisons. This work will provide significant guidance and constraints to the future development of theoretical models of galaxy growth. In Chapter 2 (Florez et al. 2021, ApJ, 906, 97) I measure the environmental dependence, where environment is defined by the distance to the third nearest neighbor, of multiple galaxy properties inside the Environmental COntext (ECO) catalog. I focus primarily on void galaxies at redshifts z = 0.015 - 0.023, which I define as the 10% of galaxies having the lowest local density. I compare the properties of void and non-void galaxies: baryonic mass, color, fractional stellar mass growth rate (FSMGR), morphology, and gas-to-stellar-mass ratio. The void galaxies typically have lower baryonic masses than galaxies in denser environments, and they display the properties expected of a lower mass population: they have more late-types, are bluer, have higher FSMGR, and are more gas rich. I also control for baryonic mass and investigate the extent to which void galaxies are different at fixed mass. I find that void galaxies are bluer, more gas-rich, and more star forming at fixed mass than non-void galaxies, which is a possible signature of galaxy assembly bias and other environmental processes. Furthermore, I show that these trends persist even at fixed mass and morphology, and I find that voids host a distinct population of early-types that are bluer and more star-forming than the typical red and quenched early-types. In addition to these empirical observational results, I also present theoretical results from mock catalogs with built-in galaxy assembly bias. I show that a simple matching of galaxy properties to (sub)halo properties, such as mass and age, can recover the observed environmental trends in the local galaxy population. In Chapter 3 (Florez et al. 2020, MNRAS, 497, 3273) I investigate the relation between AGN and star formation activity at 0.5 z 3 by analyzing 898 galaxies with high X-ray luminosity AGN (L [subscript X] 1044 erg s−1) and a large comparison sample of ~ 320,000 galaxies without such AGN. My samples are selected from a large (11.8 deg2) area in Stripe 82 that has multi-wavelength (X-ray to far-IR) data. The enormous comoving volume (~ 0.3 Gpc3) at 0.5