The MASSIVE Survey - VII. The relationship of angular momentum, stellar mass and environment of early-type galaxies

Abstract

We analyse the environmental properties of 370 local early-type galaxies (ETGs) in the MASSIVE and ATLAS(3D) surveys, two complementary volume-limited integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) galaxy surveys spanning absolute K-band magnitude -21.5 greater than or similar to M-K greater than or similar to -26.6, or stellar mass 8 x 10(9) less than or similar to M-* less than or similar to 2 x 10(12) M circle dot. We find these galaxies to reside in a diverse range of environments measured by four methods: group membership (whether a galaxy is a brightest group/cluster galaxy, satellite or isolated), halo mass, large-scale mass density (measured over a few Mpc) and local mass density (measured within the Nth neighbour). The spatially resolved IFS stellar kinematics provide robust measurements of the spin parameter lambda(e) and enable us to examine the relationship among lambda(e), M* and galaxy environment. We find a strong correlation between lambda(e) and M-*, where the average lambda(e) decreases from similar to 0.4 to below 0.1 with increasing mass, and the fraction of slow rotators f(slow) increase from similar to 10 to 90 per cent. We show for the first time that at fixed M-*, there are almost no trends between galaxy spin and environment; the apparent kinematic morphology-density relation for ETGs is therefore primarily driven by M-* and is accounted for by the joint correlations between M-* and spin, and between M-* and environment. A possible exception is that the increased f(slow) at high local density is slightly more than expected based only on these joint correlations. Our results suggest that the physical processes responsible for building up the present-day stellar masses of massive galaxies are also very efficient at reducing their spin, in any environment.