Galaxy morphologies and local densities from WINGS

Reaching a definitive answer will shed light on the main physical mechanisms at play in the most extreme environments. Here we make use of the data from the OmegaWINGS survey, currently the largest survey of clusters in the local universe extending beyond 2 virial radii from the cluster cores, to extend the previous analysis outside the virial radius.

Local density and clustercentric distance seems to play different roles for galaxies of different morphology: the fraction of elliptical galaxies mainly depends on local density, suggesting that their formation was linked to the primordial densities, which now correspond to the cluster cores. Only the fraction of low-mass ellipticals shows an anticorrelation with clustercentric distance, suggesting a different origin for these objects.