Environmental Effects on Gas and Galaxy Evolution in Clusters

Abstract

The cluster environment is the site of important transformations in galaxies at a relatively recent cosmological epoch: the galactic morphological types and star formation activity have evolved significantly during the last few Gyrs. How is this related to the galactic gas content? The first part of this paper briefly presents the optical observations of galaxies in distant clusters, while the second part focuses on the link between the HI content and the star formation activity, presenting the results of a multiwavelength study of the cluster A2670 (z=0.08) where 42 galaxies have been detected in HI. We show the star formation properties of the HI-normal and HI-deficient galaxies and discuss their dependence on the location within the cluster. Finally, we compare A2670 with clusters at intermediate redshift and with the Coma cluster.