THE EVOLUTION OF THE GALAXY STELLAR MASS FUNCTION AT z = 4–8: A STEEPENING LOW-MASS-END SLOPE WITH INCREASING REDSHIFT

By Mimi Song, S. Finkelstein, M. Ashby, A. Grazian, Yu Lu, C. Papovich, B. Salmon, R. Somerville, Mark Dickinson, K. Duncan and 9 more. 2015

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present galaxy stellar mass functions (GSMFs) at z = 4–8 from a rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) selected sample of ∼4500 galaxies, found via photometric redshifts over an area of ∼280 arcmin2 in the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS)/Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) fields and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The deepest Spitzer/IRAC data to date and the relatively large volume allow us to place a better constraint at both the low- and high-mass ends of the GSMFs compared to previous space-based studies from pre-CANDELS observations. Supplemented by a stacking analysis, we find a linear correlation between the rest-frame UV absolute magnitude at 1500 Å ( ) and logarithmic stellar mass ( ) that holds for galaxies with . We use simulations to validate our method of measuring the slope of the –MUV relation, finding that the bias is minimized with a hybrid technique combining photometry of individual bright galaxies with stacked photometry for faint galaxies. The resultant measured slopes do not significantly evolve over z = 4–8, while the normalization of the trend exhibits a weak evolution toward lower masses at higher redshift. We combine the –MUV distribution with observed rest-frame UV luminosity functions at each redshift to derive the GSMFs, finding that the low-mass-end slope becomes steeper with increasing redshift from at z = 4 to at z = 8. The inferred stellar mass density, when integrated over –1013 M⊙, increases by a factor of between z = 7 and z = 4 and is in good agreement with the time integral of the cosmic star formation rate density.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54c9af499be6dc33209a081dcfcd8eef11423ec6

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. C. Conroy
3. L. Hernquist
4. R. Dav'e
5. R. Somerville
6. T. Naab
7. P. V. van Dokkum
8. Volker Springel

In Instrumentation

1. C. Conroy
2. R. Dav'e
3. P. Hopkins
4. T. Naab
5. L. Hernquist
6. Risa Wechsler
7. P. V. van Dokkum
8. P. Behroozi

Citations in the corpus

• UniverseMachine: The correlation between galaxy growth and dark matter halo assembly from z = 0−10 (2018, methodology): “…colours Area (deg2) Notes Baldry et al. (2012) 0.002-0.06 ugriz 143 N Moustakas et al. (2013) 0.05 - 1 UV-MIR 9 SDP Tomczak et al. (2014) 0.2 - 3 UV-Ks 0.08 N Ilbert et al. (2013) 0.2 - 4 UV-Ks 1.5 NM Muzzin et al. (2013) 0.2 - 4 UV-Ks 1.5 INM Song et al. (2016) 4 - 8 UV-MIR 0.08 NUF Notes.”
• The MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Field Survey: I. Survey description, data reduction and source detection (2017, background): “…2014; Rafelski et al. 2016; Bouwens et al. 2016; Dunlop et al. 2017), measurements of stellar mass (e.g., González et al. 2011; Grazian et al. 2015; Song et al. 2016), galaxy sizes (e.g., Oesch et al. 2010; Ono et al. 2013; van der Wel et al. 2014; Shibuya et al. 2015; Curtis-Lake et al. 2016) and…”
• The COSMOS2015 galaxy stellar mass function . Thirteen billion years of stellar mass assembly in ten snapshots (2017, methodology): “To deal with the SMF uncertainties, Song et al. (2016) impose in their fitting algorithm a prior for each Schechter parameter, in particular a lognormal PDF(logM?) centred at 10.75 with σ = 0.3 dex.”
• simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, methodology): “At z = 1, 2, 3 we show observations from Tomczak et al. (2014) combining CANDELS and zFOURGE data, while at z = 4, 6 we show observations based on CANDELS from Song et al. (2016).”
• Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “…observe relatively accurate stellar mass functions not only in the local Universe (e.g. Bernardi et al. 2013, Li & White 2009, Pérez-González et al. 2008) but also towards higher redshifts (e.g. Bouwens et al. 2012, Duncan et al. 2014, Moustakas et al. 2013, Muzzin et al. 2013, Song et al. 2016).”
• Inferences on the timeline of reionization at z ∼ 8 from the KMOS Lens-Amplified Spectroscopic Survey (2019, methodology): “…resolution) for current detections of Lyα in z > 7 LBGs (Oesch et al. 2015; Roberts-Borsani et al. 2016; Stark et al. 2017; Zitrin et al. 2015; Song et al. 2016a; Finkelstein et al. 2013; Shibuya et al. 2012; Ono et al. 2012; Schenker et al. 2012; Vanzella et al. 2011; Laporte et al. 2017a).”