Evolution of the dust emission of massive galaxies up to z=4 and constraints on their dominant mode of star formation

By M. B'ethermin, E. Daddi, G. Magdis, C. Lagos, M. Sargent, M. Albrecht, H. Aussel, F. Bertoldi, V. Buat, M. Galametz and 10 more. 2014

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We aim to measure the average dust and molecular gas content of massive star-forming galaxies (>3 × 1010M⊙) up to z = 4 in the COSMOS field to determine if the intense star formation observed at high redshift is induced by major mergers or is caused by large gas reservoirs. Firstly, we measured the evolution of the average spectral energy distributions as a function of redshift using a stacking analysis of Spitzer, Herschel, LABOCA, and AzTEC data for two samples of galaxies: normal star-forming objects and strong starbursts, as defined by their distance to the main sequence. We found that the mean intensity of the radiation field ⟨ U ⟩ heating the dust (strongly correlated with dust temperature) increases with increasing redshift up to z = 4 in main-sequence galaxies. We can reproduce this evolution with simple models that account for the decrease in the gas metallicity with redshift. No evolution of ⟨ U ⟩ with redshift is found in strong starbursts. We then deduced the evolution of the molecular gas fraction (defined here as Mmol/ (Mmol + M⋆)) with redshift and found a similar, steeply increasing trend for both samples. At z ~ 4, this fraction reaches ~60%. The average position of the main-sequence galaxies is on the locus of the local, normal star-forming disks in the integrated Schmidt-Kennicutt diagram (star formation rate versus mass of molecular gas), suggesting that the bulk of the star formation up to z = 4 is dominated by secular processes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/076f1a4b3ce82aa44abd189628145b877bc0b795

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. R. Somerville
3. L. Hernquist
4. R. Dav'e
5. A. Dekel
6. C. Conroy
7. T. Naab
8. D. Narayanan

In Instrumentation

1. P. Hopkins
2. R. Somerville
3. C. Conroy
4. L. Hernquist
5. R. Dav'e
6. A. Dekel
7. T. Naab
8. Christopher J. Conselice

Citations in the corpus

• Molecular hydrogen abundances of galaxies in the EAGLE simulations (2015, unknown): “There is also a wealth of literature using dust mass as a proxy for H2 mass through the dust-to-gas mass ratio dependence on metallicity (e.g. Boselli, Lequeux & Gavazzi 2002; Santini et al. 2014; Swinbank et al. 2014; Béthermin et al. 2015).”
• The dust content of galaxies from z = 0 to z = 9 (2016, background): “…the decrease in dust mass can be explained by the observed and inferred decrease in the gas fraction of galaxies (e.g., Tacconi et al. 2010; Narayanan et al. 2012; Tacconi et al. 2013; Saintonge et al. 2013; Santini et al. 2014; Béthermin et al. 2015; Popping et al. 2015; Scoville et al. 2016).”
• A unified multiwavelength model of galaxy formation (2015, result): “…from this model have already published in other studies (Fanidakis et al. 2013a,b; Mitchell et al. 2013; Guo et al. 2014; Lagos et al. 2014a,b; Béthermin et al. 2015; Bussmann et al. 2015; Campbell et al. 2015; Cowley et al. 2015a,b, 2016; Gutcke et al. 2015; Lagos et al. 2014a, 2015; Farrow…”
• CO excitation of normal star forming galaxies out to $z=1.5$ as regulated by the properties of their interstellar medium (2014, methodology): “We choose the Béthermin et al. (2014) functional form of the< U > (z) relation which scales like (1 + z)1.8.”
• UniverseMachine: The correlation between galaxy growth and dark matter halo assembly from z = 0−10 (2018, methodology): “For the latter, we fit AUV (M1500) under the assumption of evolving dust temperatures (e.g., Béthermin et al. 2015): AUV (M1500) = 1+ erf ( M1500 +20.93 −3 ) (D1) For metallicity histories, the fiducial model adopts the gas-phase metallicities of Maiolino et al. (2008) for star formation.”
• PHIBSS: Unified Scaling Relations of Gas Depletion Time and Molecular Gas Fractions (2017, methodology): “…that of G15, because of more CO measurements (mainly from PHIBSS2, Freundlich et al. 2018, PHIBSS2 team in preparation), more FIR SED dust measurements (Santini et al. 2014, Bethermin et al. 2015) and, most importantly, because of a set of 1mm dust measurements (mostly from Scoville et al. 2016).”
• The Herschel view of the dominant mode of galaxy growth from z = 4 to the present day (2014, background): “Béthermin et al. (2015) also show that is can suffer from biases coming from the incompleteness of the input catalog.”