The Morphological Diversities among Star-forming Galaxies at High Redshifts in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey

By S. Ravindranath, M. Giavalisco, H. Ferguson, Christopher J. Conselice, N. Katz, M. Weinberg, J. Lotz, Mark Dickinson, S. M. Fall, B. Mobasher and 6 more. 2006

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We used the deep, multiwavelength images obtained by the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) to identify ~4700 Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at z > 2.5, and 292 starburst galaxies at z ~ 1.2. We present the results from morphological analysis based on light profile shape and ellipticity for ~1333 of the most luminous LBGs. About 40% of LBGs at z ~ 3 have exponential profiles, ~30% of the galaxies have steep (r1/4-like) profiles, and ~30% of LBGs have multiple cores of disturbed morphologies suggestive of close pairs or mergers. The fraction of spheriod-like LBGs decrease by about 15% from z ~ 5 to 3. A comparison of LBGs with the starburst galaxies at z ~ 1.2 shows that disklike and merger morphologies are dominant, but the fraction of spheroid-like profiles is about 20% higher among LBGs. The ellipticity distribution for LBGs exhibits a pronounced skew toward high ellipticities (ϵ > 0.5), which cannot be explained by morphologies similar to the local disks and spheroids viewed at random orientations. The peak of the distribution evolves toward lower ϵ, from 0.7 at z = 4 to ~0.5 at z = 3. The ellipticity distribution for the z ~ 1.2 galaxies is relatively flat, similar to that seen for present-day galaxies. The dominance of elongated morphologies suggests that in a significant fraction of LBGs we may be witnessing star formation in clumps along gas-rich filaments, or the earliest gas-rich bars that encompass essentially the entire visible galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f1970b2e6f8f6b28062f41454728382b7d6eb85

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Great Optically Luminous Dropout Research Using Subaru HSC (GOLDRUSH). I. UV Luminosity Functions at $z \sim 4-7$ Derived with the Half-Million Dropouts on the 100 deg$^2$ Sky (2017, background): “A uniform distribution of the intrinsic ellipticities in the range of 0.0–0.8 is assumed, since the ob- servational results of z ∼ 3− 5 dropout galaxies have roughly uniform distributions (Ravindranath et al. 2006).”
Resolved Galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Star Formation in Disks at High Redshift (2007, methodology): “Ravindranath et al. (2006) also found low n for multicore objects.”
The Evolution of Galaxy Structure Over Cosmic Time (2014, background): “The ellipticity distribution of these LBGs shows that these systems are skewed towards high values with ǫ > 0.5, which cannot be explained by viewing disks and spheroids at various angles (Ravindranath et al. 2006).”
CANDELS: THE COSMIC ASSEMBLY NEAR-INFRARED DEEP EXTRAGALACTIC LEGACY SURVEY (2011, unknown): “The distribution of disk axial ratios and the frequency of bars and spiral structures will be used to probe the degree of disk settling and the development of dynamically cold and gravitationally unstable disk structures (Förster Schreiber et al. 2009; Ravindranath et al. 2006).”
HUBBLE FRONTIER FIELDS FIRST COMPLETE CLUSTER DATA: FAINT GALAXIES AT z ∼ 5–10 FOR UV LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS AND COSMIC REIONIZATION (2014, background): “We assume a uniform distribution of the intrinsic ellipticity in the range of 0.0−0.9, because the observed ellipticities of z ∼ 3−5 dropouts roughly have uniform distributions (Ravindranath et al. 2006).”
The mass evolution of the first galaxies: stellar mass functions and star formation rates at 4 < z < 7 in the CANDELS GOODS-South field (2014, background): “Although the precise distribution of morphological profiles for high-redshift galaxies is not well known, studies of lower redshift analogues and stacked samples of LBGs suggests that they are predominantly disc-like (n < 2) (Ravindranath et al. 2006; Hathi et al. 2007).”
The structures of distant galaxies – I. Galaxy structures and the merger rate to z∼ 3 in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (2007, background): “There are also more fainter galaxies than brighter ones, thus it is not surprising that peculiars are the dominant population (e.g., Elmegreen et al. 2005; Ravindranath et al. 2006).”
The Morphologies of Massive Galaxies at 1<z<3 in the CANDELS-UDS Field: Compact Bulges, and the Rise and Fall of Massive Disks (2012, methodology): “This result is consistent with previous studies of bulge-dominated objects, both at low (Padilla & Strauss 2008) and high redshifts (Ravindranath et al. 2006).”
Galaxy merger morphologies and time-scales from simulations of equal-mass gas-rich disc mergers (2008, background): “These galaxies may also be more representative of high redshift mergers, as bulge-dominated systems are increasingly rare at z > 1 (e.g. Lotz et al. 2008; Ravindranath et al. 2006).”
The Physical Nature of Rest-UV Galaxy Morphology during the Peak Epoch of Galaxy Formation (2006, unknown): “…literature characterizing the morphologies of galaxies at redshifts z ∼ 2 − 3 (e.g. Abraham et al. 2003; Conselice et al. 2003; Lotz et al. 2004, 2006; Ravindranath et al. 2006) it is worthwhile to ask whether rest-UV morphologies correspond to any other physical observables such as UV/optical…”
SPECTROSCOPIC OBSERVATIONS OF LYMAN BREAK GALAXIES AT REDSHIFTS ∼4, 5, AND 6 IN THE GOODS-SOUTH FIELD (2009, methodology): “…discovery of these galaxies (Steidel et al. 1996a,b), including studies of their morphology and size (Giavalisco et al. 1996; Papovich et al. 2003; Ravindranath et al. 2006; Law et al. 2007; Lotz et al. 2006; Ferguson et al. 2004), their ages and stellar masses (Papovich et al. 2000; Shapley et…”
Full-data Results of Hubble Frontier Fields: UV Luminosity Functions at z ∼ 6–10 and a Consistent Picture of Cosmic Reionization (2017, background): “The ellipticities are randomly chosen from the range of 0.0–0.9, because high-redshift galaxy studies show roughly uniform distributions of the ellipticities (e.g. Ravindranath et al. 2006).”