Stellar Mass Profiles of Galaxies in the Hubble Frontier Fields: Evidence for Mass Dependency in Environmental Quenching

Quiescent galaxies have more diverse morphologies than star-forming galaxies, which might result from being either mass/environmentally quenched. At some point in their lifetimes, galaxies will stop forming new stars and become quiescent, in a process called quenching, which can be driven by internal (mass-dependent) or environmental processes. In the local universe, those two processes are considered independent of each other, but at higher redshift, they might not be separable. We explore the effect environment has on the morphology of quiescent galaxies by analyzing the stellar mass profiles of cluster and field galaxies from the Hubble Frontier Fields at a redshift range of 0.25 < z < 0.6. SED-fitting was used on the photometry to create resolved stellar mass maps, which were parameterized with a Sersic profile to quantify their morphology. The quiescent cluster galaxies were separated into disk-like and bulge-like depending the similarity of their Sersic parameters to star-forming galaxies. The fraction of disk-like quiescent galaxies have an inverse relation to stellar mass and are most abundant at the lowest masses. Since disk-like quiescents arise from environmental-quenching, cluster galaxies with M_ < 10^{9.5}M_ are predominantly environmentally-quenched, and predominantly mass-quenched above that mass limit. This shows that quenching processes that galaxy morphology in clusters are highly mass dependent.