THE ASSEMBLY OF MILKY-WAY-LIKE GALAXIES SINCE z ∼ 2.5

By P. V. van Dokkum, J. Leja, E. Nelson, Shannon G. Patel, R. Skelton, Ivelina G. Momcheva, G. Brammer, K. Whitaker, B. Lundgren, M. Fumagalli and 9 more. 2013

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Galaxies with the mass of the Milky Way dominate the stellar mass density of the universe but it is uncertain how and when they were assembled. Here we study progenitors of these galaxies out to z = 2.5, using data from the 3D-HST and CANDELS Treasury surveys. We find that galaxies with present-day stellar masses of log (M) ≈ 10.7 built ∼90% of their stellar mass since z = 2.5, with most of the star formation occurring before z = 1. In marked contrast to the assembly history of massive elliptical galaxies, mass growth is not limited to large radii: the mass in the central 2 kpc of the galaxies increased by a factor of between z = 2.5 and z = 1. We therefore rule out simple models in which bulges were fully assembled at high redshift and disks gradually formed around them. Instead, bulges (and black holes) likely formed in lockstep with disks, through bar instabilities, migration, or other processes. We find that after z = 1 the growth in the central regions gradually stopped and the disk continued to be built up, consistent with recent studies of the gas distributions in z ∼ 1 galaxies and the properties of many spiral galaxies today.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0aebd9e079e4168d9d8c17f61945bbfe0185a5ad

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Citations in the corpus

Constraining the galaxy–halo connection over the last 13.3 Gyr: star formation histories, galaxy mergers and structural properties (2017, methodology): “…and mass assembling histories of galaxies have also been partially inferred from direct empirical approaches, for instance, from observations of galaxy populations of similar masses and comoving number densities at different redshifts (e.g., van Dokkum et al. 2010, 2013; Leja et al. 2015).”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): mass–size relations of z < 0.1 galaxies subdivided by Sérsic index, colour and morphology (2014, background): “By contrast, the M∗−Re evolution of disc systems is traced at lower redshift (z 1) and appears less dramatic, evolving by roughly a factor of 2 (see for example Barden et al. 2005; Sargent et al. 2007; Buitrago et al. 2008; van Dokkum et al. 2013).”
UniverseMachine: The correlation between galaxy growth and dark matter halo assembly from z = 0−10 (2018, background): “Using cumulative number densities to follow galaxy progenitors (e.g., Leja et al. 2013; van Dokkum et al. 2013; Lin et al. 2013) has become an increasingly popular approach despite the large scatter in progenitor histories (Behroozi et al. 2013f; Torrey et al. 2017; Jaacks et al. 2016; Wellons &…”
THE 3D-HST SURVEY: HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE WFC3/G141 GRISM SPECTRA, REDSHIFTS, AND EMISSION LINE MEASUREMENTS FOR ∼100,000 GALAXIES (2015, background): “…(2010) and particularly in Whitaker et al. (2013), who 20 These deep spectra of galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field were released in 2013 (van Dokkum et al. 2013a) and are available from the 3DHST website. spectroscopically confirm the existence of a large population of galaxies with old…”
CONSTRAINING THE LOW-MASS SLOPE OF THE STAR FORMATION SEQUENCE AT 0.5 < z < 2.5 (2014, background): “…further caution that the formation of today’s bulge-disk systems was a complex process; in particular, galaxies with the present-day mass of the Milky Way increased their mass in the central regions at only a slightly smaller rate than at r > 2 kpc (e.g., van Dokkum et al. 2013; Patel et al. 2013).”
ON THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN STAR FORMATION AND FEEDBACK IN GALAXY FORMATION SIMULATIONS (2014, background): “L?) is significantly suppressed during the first 3 Gyr of cosmic evolution. van Dokkum et al. (2013) recently reached a similar conclusion by matching cumulative co-moving number densities in the 3D-HST and CANDELS Treasury surveys, demonstrating that ∼ 90% of the stellar mass in Milky Way mass…”
Star formation sustained by gas accretion (2014, background): “MW-like progenitors also grew by gas accretion from z = 2.5 to the present, according to van Dokkum et al. (2013).”
Vertical disc heating in Milky Way-sized galaxies in a cosmological context (2015, background): “This is perhaps surprising, because galaxy discs are thought to be largely fully formed by tlookback ∼ 8 Gyr (z ∼ 1) (van Dokkum et al. 2013).”
Measuring the vertical age structure of the Galactic disc using asteroseismology and SAGA (2015, background): “Importantly, high-redshift observations suggest that, for galaxies in the Milky Way mass range, this might not happen in an inside-out fashion (van Dokkum et al. 2013).”
Reconstructing the star formation history of the Milky Way disc(s) from chemical abundances (2014, methodology): “Our SFH follows closely the description given by van Dokkum et al. (2013) about MW progenitors: “the implied star formation rate is approximately constant at 10-15 M yr −1 from z∼ 2.5 to z ∼ 1 then decreases rapidly to ≤ 2 M yr−1 at z=0.””
Deriving Physical Properties from Broadband Photometry with Prospector: Description of the Model and a Demonstration of its Accuracy Using 129 Galaxies in the Local Universe (2016, background): “Milky Way-mass galaxies are thought to grow by a factor of ∼5 since z=2, and M31-mass galaxies by ∼3, with most of the growth occurring between z=1 and z=2 (Patel et al. 2013a; van Dokkum et al. 2013; Papovich et al. 2015).”
FORMING COMPACT MASSIVE GALAXIES (2015, background): “The blue and red tracks show the evolution of galaxies matched by their cumulative number density, for (relatively) low mass galaxies (van Dokkum et al. 2013, blue) and high mass galaxies (Patel et al. 2013, red).”
THE STELLAR POPULATION STRUCTURE OF THE GALACTIC DISK (2015, background): “One of them, the “lookback approach”, is based on extensive samples of galaxies that span redshifts from the time at which disks form (z ≈ 2.5) to today (z ≈ 0), matching corresponding samples across epochs (e.g., van Dokkum et al. 2013; Wisnioski et al. 2015).”
The age–metallicity structure of the Milky Way disc using APOGEE (2017, background): “…of the time evolution of galaxy disks like that of the Milky Way has arisen from studies which match galaxies of a given stellar mass at z = 0 to their progenitors at higher z (and therefore, lookback time, e.g. van Dokkum et al. 2013; Papovich et al. 2015; HuertasCompany et al. 2016).”
Measuring Radial Orbit Migration in the Galactic Disk (2018, result): “This is consistent with observations of highredshift disk galaxies (e.g., van Dokkum et al. 2013).”
Structure and Kinematics of Early-Type Galaxies from Integral Field Spectroscopy (2016, background): “(Taken from van Dokkum et al. 2013) with present-day mass M∗ ≈ 3 × 1011 M by van Dokkum et al. (2010) and followed up with a consistent approach, but for progenitors with masses M∗ ≈ 5 × 1010 M , by van Dokkum et al. (2013).”
Evolution of density profiles in high-z galaxies: compaction and quenching inside-out (2015, methodology): “Several studies have investigated the stellar mass density distribution within galaxies at high redshifts (e.g., Elmegreen et al. 2009; Förster Schreiber et al. 2011; Wuyts et al. 2012; van Dokkum et al. 2013; Patel et al. 2013; Lang et al. 2014; Morishita et al. 2015).”