The dependence of star formation history and internal structure on stellar mass for 105 low‐redshift galaxies

By G. Kauffmann, T. Heckman, Simon D. M. White, S. Charlot, Christy A. Tremonti, E. Peng, M. Seibert, J. Brinkmann, Robert Nichol, Mark SubbaRao and 1 more. 2002

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We study the relations between stellar mass, star formation history, size and internal structure for a complete sample of 122 808 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We show that low-redshift galaxies divide into two distinct families at a stellar mass of 3 x 10 1 0 M O .. Lower-mass galaxies have young stellar populations, low surface mass densities and the low concentrations typical of discs. Their star formation histories are more strongly correlated with surface mass density than with stellar mass. A significant fraction of the lowest-mass galaxies in our sample have experienced recent starbursts. At given stellar mass, the sizes of low-mass galaxies are lognormally distributed with dispersion σ(In R 5 0 ) ∼0.5, in excellent agreement with the idea that they form with little angular momentum loss through cooling and condensation in a gravitationally dominant dark matter halo. Their median stellar surface mass density scales with stellar mass as μ * M * 0.54, suggesting that the stellar mass of a disc galaxy is proportional to the three halves power of its halo mass. All of this suggests that the efficiency of the conversion of baryons into stars in low-mass galaxies increases in proportion to halo mass, perhaps as a result of supernova feedback processes. At stellar masses above 3 x 10 1 0 M O ., there is a rapidly increasing fraction of galaxies with old stellar populations, high surface mass densities and the high concentrations typical of bulges. In this regime, the size distribution remains lognormal, but its dispersion decreases rapidly with increasing mass and the median stellar mass surface density is approximately constant. This suggests that the star formation efficiency decreases in the highest-mass haloes, and that little star formation occurs in massive galaxies after they have assembled.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31f0d6aa72e2288be650f4e9e1114cb29377b549

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Citations in the corpus

A Comparison of the Galaxy Populations in the Coma and Distant Clusters: The Evolution of k+a Galaxies and the Role of the Intracluster Medium (2003, background): “It has been suggested, for example, that the star formation efficiency could increase with dark matter halo mass, perhaps as a result of supernova feedback processes, resulting in the majority of massive galaxies not forming stars at the present day (Kauffmann et al. 2003).”
The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: Color and Luminosity Dependence of Galaxy Clustering at z ∼ 1 (2007, background): “…has been seen clearly as a function of galaxy morphology, color, and spectral type, where galaxies tend to be either early/bulge-dominated/red/nonstar forming or late/disk-dominated/blue/star forming (e.g., Strateva et al. 2001; Madgwick et al. 2002; Blanton et al. 2003a; Kauffmann et al. 2003).”
3D-HST: A WIDE-FIELD GRISM SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY WITH THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE (2012, background): “However, at low redshift most massive galaxies are quiescent regardless of environment (Kauffmann et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004), so it is difficult to determine whether the environment provides a physical mechanism that alters the galaxies (e.g., through gas stripping), or whether dense…”
The Bimodal Galaxy Color Distribution: Dependence on Luminosity and Environment (2004, background): “Recently, this division has been quantified in large datasets, in the related quantities of broadband color (Strateva et al. 2001; Blanton et al. 2003a; Kauffmann et al. 2003) and star formation rate (SFR, Brinchmann et al. 2003; Balogh et al. 2004, hereafter Paper II).”
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THE DEPENDENCE OF QUENCHING UPON THE INNER STRUCTURE OF GALAXIES AT 0.5 ⩽ z < 0.8 IN THE DEEP2/AEGIS SURVEY (2012, background): “For a sample of local SDSS galaxies, Kauffmann et al. (2003) found that the correlations between the star formation history indicators Dn(4000) and HδA (which can also be thought of as a proxy for galaxy color) and mass are significantly better than that of theg-band luminosity.”
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Stellar masses and star formation histories for 105 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2002, neutral): “The dependence of galaxy properties on stellar mass is addressed in a separate paper (Kauffmann et al. 2003, Paper II).”
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