Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 665

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 43 of the 43 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Bimodal Galaxy Color Distribution: Dependence on Luminosity and Environment

Open access
Balogh, Michael L., Baldry, Ivan K., Nichol, Robert, Miller, Chris, Bower, Richard, Glazebrook, Karl·2004·The Astrophysical Journal
DOI 10.1086/426079
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

We analyze the u - r color distribution of 24,346 galaxies with M r ≤ -18 and z < 0.08, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey first data release, as a function of luminosity and environment. The color distribution is well fitted with two Gaussian distributions, which we use to divide the sample into a blue and red population. At fixed luminosity, the mean color of the blue (red) distribution is nearly independent of environment, with a weakly significant (~3 σ) detection of a trend for colors to become redder by 0.1-0.14 (0.03-0.06) mag with a factor of ~100 increase in local density, as characterized by the surface density of galaxies within a ±1000 km s -1 redshift slice. In contrast, at fixed luminosity the fraction of galaxies in the red distribution is a strong function of local density, increasing from ~10%-30% of the population in the lowest density environments to ~70% at the highest densities. The strength of this trend is similar for both the brightest (-23 < M r < -22) and faintest (-19 < M r < -18) galaxies in our sample. The fraction of red galaxies within the virialized regions of clusters shows no significant dependence on velocity dispersion. Even at the lowest densities explored, a substantial population of red galaxies exists, which might be fossil groups. We propose that most star-forming galaxies today evolve at a rate that is determined primarily by their intrinsic properties and independent of their environment. Any environmentally triggered transformations from blue to red colors must occur either on a short timescale or preferentially at high redshift to preserve the simple Gaussian nature of the color distribution. The mechanism must be effective for both bright and faint galaxies.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/426079

Cites

43 of 43 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 43 references

Cited by

See all 665

Metadata

Authors
Balogh, M. L., Baldry, I. K., Nichol, R., Miller, C., Bower, R., & Glazebrook, K.
Venue
The Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Published
2004-09-30
Volume
615
Issue
2
Pages
L101-L104
ISSN
  • 0004-637X (ISSN-L)
  • 1538-4357
DOI
10.1086/426079
OpenAlex
W2061231038
Cited by
665
References
43
FWCI
18.51
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Bimodal Galaxy Color Distribution: Dependence on Luminosity and Environment. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/426079
The paper
Balogh, M. L., Baldry, I. K., Nichol, R., Miller, C., Bower, R., & Glazebrook, K. (2004). The Bimodal Galaxy Color Distribution: Dependence on Luminosity and Environment. The Astrophysical Journal. https://doi.org/10.1086/426079

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.