Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): ugriz galaxy luminosity functions

By J. Loveday, P. Norberg, I. Baldry, S. Driver, Andrew M. Hopkins, J. Peacock, Steven Bamford, J. Liske, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, S. Brough and 24 more. 2011

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) is a project to study galaxy formation and evolution, combining imaging data from ultraviolet to radio with spectroscopic data from the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. Using data from Phase 1 of GAMA, taken over three observing seasons, and correcting for various minor sources of incompleteness, we calculate galaxy luminosity functions (LFs) and their evolution in the ugriz passbands. At low redshift, z < 0.1, we find that blue galaxies, defined according to a magnitude-dependent but non-evolving colour cut, are reasonably well fitted over a range of more than 10 magnitudes by simple Schechter functions in all bands. Red galaxies, and the combined blue plus red sample, require double power-law Schechter functions to fit a dip in their LF faintwards of the characteristic magnitude M* before a steepening faint end. This upturn is at least partly due to dust-reddened disc galaxies. We measure the evolution of the galaxy LF over the redshift range 0.002 < z < 0.5 both by using a parametric fit and by measuring binned LFs in redshift slices. The characteristic luminosity L* is found to increase with redshift in all bands, with red galaxies showing stronger luminosity evolution than blue galaxies. The comoving number density of blue galaxies increases with redshift, while that of red galaxies decreases, consistent with prevailing movement from blue cloud to red sequence. As well as being more numerous at higher redshift, blue galaxies also dominate the overall luminosity density beyond redshifts z≃ 0.2. At lower redshifts, the luminosity density is dominated by red galaxies in the riz bands, and by blue galaxies in u and g.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Galaxy and mass assembly (GAMA): End of survey report and data release 2 (2015, methodology): “The above have been used, inter alia, to derive the broad-band (Loveday et al. 2012, 2015) and Hα (Gunawardhana et al. 2013) luminosity and stellar mass (Baldry et al. 2012; Gunawardhana et al. 2015) functions, to consider the luminosity and stellar mass functions split by Hubble type (Kelvin et…”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): the galaxy stellar mass function at z < 0.06 (2011, methodology): “In other GAMA papers, Loveday et al. (2012) determines theugriz GLFs, Driver et al. (2012) determines the cosmic spectral energy distribution from the far ultraviolet to infrared, while Brough et al. (2011) looks at the properties of galaxies at the faint end ofthe Hα GLF.”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Spectroscopic analysis (2013, background): “The broadband luminosity functions are derived by Loveday et al. (2012), and the Hα luminosity functions and evolution presented in Gunawardhana et al. (2013).”
PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, background): “…of the optical luminosity function have shown that galaxies brighten toward higher redshift (e.g., Blanton et al. 2003c; Faber et al. 2007; Loveday et al. 2012; Cool et al. 2012); consequently, higher-redshift galaxies will be observable over a larger cosmological volume (i.e., Vmax will…”
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): “Previous studies have shown that the UV LF of low-z galaxies has an exponen- tial cutoff (e.g., Loveday et al. 2012; Kelvin et al. 2014), which is thought to be caused by several different mechanisms such as heating from an active galactic nucleus (AGN; Binney 2004; Scannapieco & Oh 2004; Granato…”
Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): improved cosmic growth measurements using multiple tracers of large-scale structure (2013, methodology): “2 (Blanton & Roweis 2007) using SDSS model magnitudes (see Loveday et al. 2012 for more details).”
Colours and luminosities of z = 0.1 galaxies in the eagle simulation (2015, methodology): “Observed LFs from Loveday et al. (2012) are plotted in each of the ugriz bands, which we fit with a single Schechter (1976) function, 1 L dn dL = φ ( L L )α exp(−L/L ) dL L .”
Stellar masses of SDSS-III/BOSS galaxies at z ∼ 0.5 and constraints to galaxy formation models (2012, background): “…al. 2004; Bundyet al. 2006; Cimatti et al. 2006; Ilbert et al. 2010; Pozzetti et al.2010), including studies considering the luminosity function instead of the mass function in the same redshift range explored here (e.g. Blanton et al. 2003; Wake et al. 2006; Cool et al. 2008; Loveday et al. 2012).”