Galaxy And Mass Assembly: Stellar Mass Estimates

By E. Taylor, Andrew M. Hopkins, I. Baldry, Michael J. I. Brown, S. Driver, Lee S. Kelvin, D. Hill, A. Robotham, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, D. Jones and 25 more. 2011

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This paper describes the first catalogue of photometrically-derived stellar mass estimates for intermediate-redshift (z < 0.65) galaxies in the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) spectroscopic redshift survey. These masses, as well as the full set of ancillary stellar population parameters, will be made public as part of GAMA data release 2. Although the GAMA database does include NIR photometry, we show that the quality of our stellar population synthesis fits is significantly poorer when these NIR data are included. Further, for a large fraction of galaxies, the stellar population parameters inferred from the optical-plus-NIR photometry are formally inconsistent with those inferred from the optical data alone. This may indicate problems in our stellar population library, or NIR data issues, or both; these issues will be addressed for future versions of the catalogue. For now, we have chosen to base our stellar mass estimates on optical photometry only. In light of our decision to ignore the available NIR data, we examine how well stellar mass can be constrained based on optical data alone. We use generic properties of stellar population synthesis models to demonstrate that restframe colour alone is in principle a very good estimator of stellar mass-to-light ratio, M*/Li. Further, we use the observed relation between restframe (g-i) and M*/Li for real GAMA galaxies to argue that, modulo uncertainties in the stellar evolution models themselves, (g-i) colour can in practice be used to estimate M*/Li to an accuracy of < ~0.1 dex. This 'empirically calibrated' (g-i)-M*/Li relation offers a simple and transparent means for estimating galaxies' stellar masses based on minimal data, and so provides a solid basis for other surveys to compare their results to z < ~0.4 measurements from GAMA.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b7be6c4b34f442db39189d4e2bb26a7f2ab0b1a

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Citations in the corpus

EXTENDING THE NEARBY GALAXY HERITAGE WITH WISE: FIRST RESULTS FROM THE WISE ENHANCED RESOLUTION GALAXY ATLAS (2012, methodology): “The GAMA stellar masses are derived using optical (g-i) colors, stellar population synthesis models and careful Bayesian parameter estimation (Taylor et al. 2011), all of which contribute to the observed WISE vs GAMA M/L slope difference; but moreover, the GAMA G15 field has a greater variety of…”
The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Instrument specification and target selection (2014, methodology): “The total number of galaxies included in this selection 4 The GAMA catalogues used here are TilingCatv29.fits (Baldry et al. 2010), ApMatchedCatv03.fits (Hill et al. 2011), GalacticExtinctionv02.fits, DistancesFramesv08.fits (Baldry et al. 2012), SersicCatAllv07.fits (Kelvin et al. 2012), StellarMas”
A DIRECT MEASUREMENT OF THE BARYONIC MASS FUNCTION OF GALAXIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE GALACTIC BARYON FRACTION (2012, methodology): “…SMF presented in this work (computed from stellar masses derived from SED-fitting, see §2.3) with the SMF obtained using stellar masses derived from a single galactic color, according to the widely-used Bell et al. (2003) calibration as well as the more recent calibration of Taylor et al. (2011).”
A LINK BETWEEN STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND INNER STELLAR MASS DENSITY IN SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY CENTRAL GALAXIES (2013, result): “This relation is consistent, within the uncertainties, with the M/Li calibration determined by Taylor et al. (2011) for a larger sample of SDSS galaxies.”
Cold Molecular Outflows in the Local Universe and Their Feedback Effect on Galaxies (2018, background): “Although the use of different colours for some of the galaxies may potentially be a matter of concern, Bell & de Jong (2001) and Taylor et al. (2011) have shown that there is no systematic uncertainties on the inferred stellar masses when different colours and different (IR/red) bands are used.”
How to Measure Galaxy Star Formation Histories. II. Nonparametric Models (2018, unknown): “The stellar masses used for the selection are from Taylor et al. (2011) and the GAMA survey is mass-complete in this mass and redshift range.”
An Older, More Quiescent Universe from Panchromatic SED Fitting of the 3D-HST Survey (2018, background): “…a long history of skepticism in the literature about the accuracy of galaxy SED modeling results (e.g., Papovich et al. 2001; Shapley et al. 2005; Conroy & Wechsler 2009; Wuyts et al. 2009; Behroozi et al. 2010; Taylor et al. 2011; Walcher et al. 2011; Mobasher et al. 2015; Santini et al. 2015).”
A CANDELS–3D-HST SYNERGY: RESOLVED STAR FORMATION PATTERNS AT 0.7 < z < 1.5 (2013, methodology): “…of ∼ 0.2 dex can arguably even be obtained on the basis of two broad bands, provided they bracket the Balmer/4000Å break (Bell & de Jong 2001; Taylor et al. 2011; and see Förster Schreiber et al. 2011a for an application of this technique to the resolved mass distribution in a z ∼ 2…”
Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, methodology): “Finally, many mathematically different techniques have been used to fit models to data, ranging from simple minimum χ2 fitting (e.g. Bell et al. 2003), to maximum-likelihood (e.g. Kauffmann et al. 2003; Taylor et al. 2011), and Bayesian methods (e.g. Auger et al. 2009).”
STELLAR MASSES AND STAR FORMATION RATES FOR 1 M GALAXIES FROM SDSS+WISE (2015, background): “The resulting stellar masses have been demonstrated to correlate tightly with total, dynamical mass estimates (Taylor et al. 2011) with a scatter of only 0.13 dex.”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): the galaxy stellar mass function at z < 0.06 (2011, methodology): “10) because the M/Li of dwarf galaxies around108M⊙ is typically less than 0.8 from the fitting of Taylor et al. (2011).”
GALAXY AND MASS ASSEMBLY (GAMA): MID-INFRARED PROPERTIES AND EMPIRICAL RELATIONS FROM WISE (2014, methodology): “We can investigate the specific star formation rate (sSFR) of the entire sample by using L12 μm-derived SFRs (Equation (5)) and the GAMA stellar masses (Taylor et al. 2011).”
Galaxy Interactions Trigger Rapid Black Hole Growth: an unprecedented view from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “1, in the lowest redshift bin, our sample is dominated by galaxies identified in the GAMA-DR2 survey, which is complete to M∗∼5×109M⊙ for star-forming galaxies with restframe g− i < 0.5 (Taylor et al. 2011) at the median redshift of the bin (z ∼ 0.2).”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: calibration of subgrid physics and model variations (2015, methodology): “…systematic uncertainties in the stellar evolution models used to infer the masses (Conroy, Gunn & White 2009; Pforr, Maraston & Tonini 2012, but see Taylor et al. 2011), peculiar velocity corrections for faint galaxies (e.g. Baldry et al. 2012), and the method used to subtract the sky background…”
The SAMI Galaxy Survey: shocks and outflows in a normal star-forming galaxy (2014, background): “1) is an isolated disk galaxy located in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey field (SDSS; York et al. 2000), with a SDSS r-band magnitude of 15.1, and a logarithmic stellar mass of 10.8 M (Taylor et al. 2011).”
Evolution of galaxy stellar masses and star formation rates in the eagle simulations (2014, background): “At redshift 0, Taylor et al. (2011) quote ∼0.1 dex (1σ ) errors for GAMA data.”
A CATALOG OF BULGE, DISK, AND TOTAL STELLAR MASS ESTIMATES FOR THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (2013, methodology): “We follow Taylor et al. (2011) in sampling τ on a semi-uniform grid where log(τ/yr) spans the range 8–9 in steps of 0.2 dex, and from 9.1–10 in steps of 0.1 dex.”
3D-HST: A WIDE-FIELD GRISM SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY WITH THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE (2012, background): “Current state-of-the-art photometric techniques provide a redshift precision of σ/(1 + z) ∼ 2% (e.g., Whitaker et al. 2011) and stellar mass estimates with precision ∼0.1 dex (Taylor et al. 2011), but with potentially large systematic uncertainties (e.g., Marchesini et al. 2009).”
PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, background): “…Bayesian formalism pioneered by Kauffmann et al. (2003a) to model the optical spectral features of SDSS galaxies, and its subsequent extension to broadband photometry (e.g., Bundy et al. 2005; Salim et al. 2005, 2007; da Cunha et al. 2008; Auger et al. 2009; McGee et al. 2011; Taylor et al. 2011).”