STAR FORMATION AND DUST OBSCURATION AT z ≈ 2: GALAXIES AT THE DAWN OF DOWNSIZING

By M. Pannella, C. Carilli, E. Daddi, H. McCracken, F. Owen, A. Renzini, V. Strazzullo, F. Civano, A. Koekemoer, E. Schinnerer and 10 more. 2009

287 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present first results of a study aimed to constrain the star formation rate (SFR) and dust content of galaxies at z ≈ 2. We use a sample of BzK-selected star-forming galaxies, drawn from the Cosmic Evolution Survey, to perform a stacking analysis of their 1.4 GHz radio continuum as a function of different stellar population properties, after cleaning the sample from contamination by active galactic nuclei. Dust unbiased SFRs are derived from radio fluxes assuming the local radio-IR correlation. The main results of this work are: (1) specific star formation rate (SSFR)s are constant over about 1 dex in stellar mass and up to the highest stellar mass probed, (2) the dust attenuation is a strong function of galaxy stellar mass with more massive galaxies being more obscured than lower mass objects, (3) a single value of the UV extinction applied to all galaxies would lead to a gross underestimate of the SFR in massive galaxies, (4) correcting the observed UV luminosities for dust attenuation based on the Calzetti recipe provides results in very good agreement with the radio derived ones, (5) the mean SSFR of our sample steadily decreases by a factor of ∼4 with decreasing redshift from z = 2.3 to 1.4 and a factor of ∼40 down the local universe. These empirical SFRs would cause galaxies to dramatically overgrow in mass if maintained all the way to low redshifts; we suggest that this does not happen because star formation is progressively quenched, likely starting from the most massive galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. R. Dav'e
4. D. M. Alexander
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6. R. Somerville
7. A. Dekel
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In Instrumentation

1. P. V. van Dokkum
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6. A. Dekel
7. M. Franx
8. R. Somerville

Citations in the corpus

• CO excitation of normal star forming galaxies out to $z=1.5$ as regulated by the properties of their interstellar medium (2014, background): “…a tight correlation between their stellar mass and SFR with typically a factor of two dispersion (Noeske et al 2007; Elbaz et al 2007; 2011; Daddi et al 2007; 2009a; Pannella et al 2009; Karim et al 2011; Whitaker et al 2012; Magdis et al. 2010; Rodighiero et al 2011; 2014; Schreiber et al. 2014).”
• Predicting dust extinction from the stellar mass of a galaxy (2010, background): “The typical extinction of a galaxy increases with stellar mass, as has been found in previous studies (e.g. Brinchmann et al. 2004; Stasińska et al. 2004; Pannella et al. 2009), and rises steadily C© 2010 The Authors.”
• ALMA SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY IN THE HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD: THE INFRARED EXCESS OF UV-SELECTED z = 2–10 GALAXIES AS A FUNCTION OF UV-CONTINUUM SLOPE AND STELLAR MASS (2016, methodology): “A series of intermediateredshift studies (Reddy et al. 2006, 2010; Daddi et al. 2007; Pannella et al. 2009) found this relationship to be approximately valid when comparing the observed IR luminosities of galaxies to the predictions from the M99 IRX-β relationship.”
• Accreting supermassive black holes in the COSMOS field and the connection to their host galaxies (2012, background): “…terms, such a distribution is observed, almost unchanged, at any redshift, with the sequence of star-forming galaxies maintaining the same slope but increasing normalization as one moves towards higher redshift (Daddi et al. 2007; Elbaz et al. 2007; Noeske et al. 2007; Pannella et al. 2009).”
• On the origin of the galaxy star‐formation‐rate sequence: evolution and scatter (2009, result): “Studies above z 1 tend to find steeper slopes of around 0.9, in particular the recent study by Pannella et al. (2009) finds a slope of 0.95 ± 0.07 at z 2 for stellar masses in the range Mstar 1010.2−11.0 M .”
• A UNIFIED EMPIRICAL MODEL FOR INFRARED GALAXY COUNTS BASED ON THE OBSERVED PHYSICAL EVOLUTION OF DISTANT GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “Here, we apply the relation of Pannella et al. (2009): r1500= 2.5log ( SFRIR SFRUV ) = 4.07× log ( M⋆ M⊙ ) − 39.32, (7) and assume redshift-invariance, as suggested by Sobral et al. (2012) and Pannella et al. (in prep.).”
• GOODS-HERSCHEL: STAR FORMATION, DUST ATTENUATION, AND THE FIR–RADIO CORRELATION ON THE MAIN SEQUENCE OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES UP TO z ≃ 4 (2014, methodology): “The dashed and long–dashed lines show the SSFR as a function of redshift according to the relations published in Pannella et al. (2009b) and Elbaz et al. (2011).”
• THE CONTRIBUTION OF STARBURSTS AND NORMAL GALAXIES TO INFRARED LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS AT z < 2 (2012, background): “…a tight relation (dispersion <0.3 dex) – the “galaxy main sequence” – according to which sSFR is a constant or slowly decreasing function of M⋆ (e.g., Brinchmann et al. 2004, Daddi et al. 2007, Elbaz et al. 2007, 2011, Noeske et al. 2007, Damen et al. 2009, Pannella et al. 2009, Karim et al. 2011).”
• Molecular and atomic gas along and across the main sequence of star-forming galaxies (2016, background): “It it often parametrised as a linear relation between log M∗ and log SFR, with a slope in the range of 0.5 to 1.0 and a scatter about this relation of∼ 0.3 dex (e.g.Noeske et al. 2007; Pannella et al. 2009; Rodighiero et al. 2010).”
• VERY HIGH GAS FRACTIONS AND EXTENDED GAS RESERVOIRS IN z = 1.5 DISK GALAXIES (2009, methodology): “For example, the cosmic evolution of the normalization of the relation (Daddi et al. 2009; Pannella et al. 2009; Gonzales et al. 2009) is similar to the cosmic evolution of the SFRD (Hopkins & Beacom 2006; 2008; Le Borgne et al. 2009, etc).”
• GOODS-Herschel: the far-infrared view of star formation in active galactic nucleus host galaxies since z ≈ 3 (2011, methodology): “…intense nuclear star formation. are roughly proportional to galaxy stellar mass (e.g., Noeske et al. 2007; Elbaz et al. 2007; Daddi et al. 2007; Pannella et al. 2009a; Dunne et al. 2009; Magdis et al. 2010), meaning systematic differences in the stellar masses of difference populations of…”
• REGULARITY UNDERLYING COMPLEXITY: A REDSHIFT-INDEPENDENT DESCRIPTION OF THE CONTINUOUS VARIATION OF GALAXY-SCALE MOLECULAR GAS PROPERTIES IN THE MASS-STAR FORMATION RATE PLANE (2013, unknown): “…SFR and M⋆ in SFGs charted its evolution to z∼ 2.5 using different SFR tracers and selection criteria (e.g., Damen et al. 2009, Dunne et al. 2009, Pannella et al. 2009, Santini et al. 2009, Kajisawa et al. 2010, Oliver et al. 2010, Elbaz et al. 2011, Lee et al. 2011, Rodighiero et al. 2011,…”
• ON STAR FORMATION RATES AND STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF GALAXIES OUT TO z ∼ 3 (2011, background): “Its precise value is still widely debated (Noeske et al. 2007; Cowie & Barger 2008; Pannella et al. 2009; Santini et al. 2009; Rodighiero et al. 2010), and may evolve with redshift (Dunne et al. 2009).”
• UV LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS AT REDSHIFTS z ∼ 4 TO z ∼ 10: 10,000 GALAXIES FROM HST LEGACY FIELDS (2014, background): “…1977; Silk 1977), and the increasing importance of dust attenuation for the most luminous and likely most massive galaxies (Bouwens et al. 2009; Pannella et al. 2009; Reddy et al. 2010; Bouwens et al. 2012; Finkelstein et al. 2012; Bouwens et al. 2013), there is no obvious reason any of these…”
• UV-CONTINUUM SLOPES AT z  ∼  4–7 FROM THE HUDF09+ERS+CANDELS OBSERVATIONS: DISCOVERY OF A WELL-DEFINED UV COLOR–MAGNITUDE RELATIONSHIP FOR z ⩾ 4 STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2011, background): “Such a correlation of dust content with mass has been explicitly shown (e.g., Figure 18 from Reddy et al. 2010 vand Figure 5 from Pannella et al. 2009).”
• Enhanced star formation rates in AGN hosts with respect to inactive galaxies from PEP-Herschel observations (2012, background): “…with redshift up toz ∼ 2 − 3, an epoch which corresponds to the peak of SF (e.g. Hopkins & Beacom 2006), and to flatten at higher redshifts, its slope is still debated (see discussion in Dunne et al. 2009; Pannella et al. 2009; Santini et al. 2009; Rodighiero et al. 2010; Karim et al. 2011).”
• GOODS-HERSCHEL MEASUREMENTS OF THE DUST ATTENUATION OF TYPICAL STAR-FORMING GALAXIES AT HIGH REDSHIFT: OBSERVATIONS OF ULTRAVIOLET-SELECTED GALAXIES AT z ∼ 2 (2011, methodology): “18 For the most conservative estimate of the stacked radio flux, we did not correct for bandwidth smearing (e.g., Pannella et al. 2009), rather we fit an elliptical Gaussian to the stacked light profile and adopted the peak value for the radio flux.”
• The confinement of star-forming galaxies into a main sequence through episodes of gas compaction, depletion and replenishment (2015, background): “The Lilly et al. (2013) line is based on best-fitting to the cumulated data of Noeske et al. (2007a); Elbaz et al. (2007); Daddi et al. (2007); Pannella et al. (2009) and Stark et al. (2013).”