THE STAR FORMATION HISTORY OF MASS-SELECTED GALAXIES IN THE COSMOS FIELD

By A. Karim, E. Schinnerer, A. Martínez-Sansigre, M. Sargent, A. van der Wel, Hans-Walter Rix, O. Ilbert, V. Smolčić, C. Carilli, M. Pannella and 3 more. 2010

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We explore the redshift evolution of the specific star formation rate (SSFR) for galaxies of different stellar mass by drawing on a deep 3.6 μm selected sample of >105 galaxies in the 2 deg2 COSMOS field. The average star formation rate (SFR) for subsets of these galaxies is estimated with stacked 1.4 GHz radio continuum emission. We separately consider the total sample and a subset of galaxies that shows evidence for substantive recent star formation in the rest-frame optical spectral energy distributions. At redshifts 0.2 < z < 3 both populations show a strong and mass-independent decrease in their SSFR toward the present epoch. It is best described by a power law (1 + z)n, where n ∼ 4.3 for all galaxies and n ∼ 3.5 for star-forming (SF) sources. The decrease appears to have started at z>2, at least for high-mass (M* ≳ 4 × 1010 M☉) systems where our conclusions are most robust. Our data show that there is a tight correlation with power-law dependence, SSFR ∝ M*β, between SSFR and stellar mass at all epochs. The relation tends to flatten below M* ≈ 1010 M☉ if quiescent galaxies are included; if they are excluded from the analysis a shallow index βSFG ≈ −0.4 fits the correlation. On average, higher mass objects always have lower SSFRs, also among SF galaxies. At z>1.5 there is tentative evidence for an upper threshold in SSFR that an average galaxy cannot exceed, possibly due to gravitationally limited molecular gas accretion. It is suggested by a flattening of the SSFR–M* relation (also for SF sources), but affects massive (>1010 M☉) galaxies only at the highest redshifts. Since z = 1.5 there thus is no direct evidence that galaxies of higher mass experience a more rapid waning of their SSFR than lower mass SF systems. In this sense, the data rule out any strong “downsizing” in the SSFR. We combine our results with recent measurements of the galaxy (stellar) mass function in order to determine the characteristic mass of an SF galaxy: we find that since z ∼ 3 the majority of all new stars were always formed in galaxies of M* = 1010.6±0.4 M☉. In this sense, too, there is no “downsizing.” Finally, our analysis constitutes the most extensive SFR density determination with a single technique out to z = 3. Recent Herschel results are consistent with our results, but rely on far smaller samples.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• A Herschel view of the far-infrared properties of submillimetre galaxies (2012, background): “…and the stellar mass of star-forming galaxies has been observed over the last 10 Gyr of lookback time (SFR∝ Mα∗ or SSFR=SFR/M∗ ∝M α−1 ∗ with 0.5 < α < 1.0; Noeske et al. 2007; Elbaz et al. 2007; Daddi et al. 2007b; Rodighiero et al. 2010; Oliver et al. 2010; Karim et al. 2011; Mancini et al. 2011).”
• An ALMA survey of sub-millimetre Galaxies in the Extended Chandra Deep Field South: the far-infrared properties of SMGs (2013, background): “9 shows, over the redshift range z=1–5, bright (S870 > 4.2mJy) account for ∼ 1–2% of the total star formation density (Hopkins & Beacom 2006; Karim et al. 2011).”
• A LARGE POPULATION OF MASSIVE COMPACT POST-STARBURST GALAXIES AT z > 1: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE SIZE EVOLUTION AND QUENCHING MECHANISM OF QUIESCENT GALAXIES (2011, background): “Moreover, the drop in the number density of recently quenched galaxies at z ∼ 1 coincides with the epoch where the cosmic star formation rate density falls off (e.g., Karim et al. 2011).”
• THE HIDDEN “AGN MAIN SEQUENCE”: EVIDENCE FOR A UNIVERSAL BLACK HOLE ACCRETION TO STAR FORMATION RATE RATIO SINCE z ∼ 2 PRODUCING AN MBH–M* RELATION (2012, background): “…rate that is roughly proportional to their stellar masses (M∗) since at least z ∼ 2, while their average specific SFRs (i.e., sSFR = SFR/M∗) increase strongly with redshift (e.g., Noeske et al. 2007; Elbaz et al. 2007; Daddi et al. 2007a; Pannella et al. 2009; Karim et al. 2011; Elbaz et al. 2011).”
• X-shooter reveals powerful outflows in z ∼ 1.5 X-ray selected obscured quasi-stellar objects (2014, background): “…our sources lie on or below the MS of star forming galaxies at z∼ 1.5 while both Harrison et al. (2012b) and Förster Schreiber et al. (2014) targets lie on average on the upper part or above the MS even when considering the redshift evolution of the sSFR (Whitaker et al. 2012; Karim et al. 2011).”
• An ALMA survey of submillimetre galaxies in the Extended Chandra Deep Field South: high-resolution 870 μm source counts (2012, methodology): “The recipes we follow to determine the full uncertainty for elliptical source fits in the presence of correlated noise in radio maps have been motivated by Condon (1997) (see also Windhorst et al. 1984; Hopkins et al. 2003, Schinnerer et al. 2004, 2010; Karim et al. 2011).”
• ISM MASSES AND THE STAR FORMATION LAW AT Z = 1 TO 6: ALMA OBSERVATIONS OF DUST CONTINUUM IN 145 GALAXIES IN THE COSMOS SURVEY FIELD (2015, background): “…specific star formation rate, (sSFR ≡ SFR/Mstellar), is roughly constant along the MS at each cosmic epoch but increases 20-fold out to z ∼ 2.5, consistent with the overall increase in the cosmic star formation rate (Hopkins & Beacom 2006; Karim et al. 2011; Whitaker et al. 2012; Lee et al. 2015).”
• 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): “…2012, Behroozi et al. 2013) and that the strong decline of the cosmic SFR density since z∼ 2 (e.g., Reddy & Steidel 2009, Rodighiero et al. 2010, Karim et al. 2011, Magnelli et al. 2011, Cucciati et al. 2012; and references therein) reflects the uniform SFR evolution of the majority of the…”
• THE AVERAGE STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF GALAXIES IN DARK MATTER HALOS FROM z = 0–8 (2012, unknown): “…1.9 Hα 0.029 deg2 I Tadaki et al. (2011) 2.2 Hα 0.0156 deg2 I Sobral et al. (2013) 0.4-2.3 Hα 0.016-1.7 deg2 I Magnelli et al. (2011) 1.3-2.3 IR 0.0786 deg2 I Karim et al. (2011) 0.2− 3 1.4 GHz 2 deg2 Ly et al. (2011b) 1− 3 UV 0.241 deg2 AI Kajisawa et al. (2010) 0.5− 3.5 UV/IR 0.029 deg2…”
• Deriving Physical Properties from Broadband Photometry with Prospector: Description of the Model and a Demonstration of its Accuracy Using 129 Galaxies in the Local Universe (2016, background): “…Ilbert et al. 2013; Moustakas et al. 2013; Muzzin et al. 2013; Tomczak et al. 2014) and for the SFR– mass relationship (e.g., Brinchmann et al. 2004; Daddi et al. 2007; Noeske et al. 2007; Peng et al. 2010; Karim et al. 2011; Whitaker et al. 2012, 2014; Speagle et al. 2014; Ilbert et al. 2015).”
• The VLA-COSMOS 3 GHz Large Project: Continuum data and source catalog release (2017, background): “…a dust-unbiased star formation tracer at high angular resolution (e.g., Condon 1992; Haarsma et al. 2000; Seymour et al. 2008; Smolčić et al. 2009b; Karim et al. 2011); and ii) directly probes those active galactic nuclei (AGN) that are hosted by the most massive quiescent galaxies and deemed…”
• THE FMOS-COSMOS SURVEY OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES AT z ∼ 1.6. I. Hα-BASED STAR FORMATION RATES AND DUST EXTINCTION (2013, background): “Values of the f factor larger than 0.44 are also favored in a recent Herschel work (M. Pannella et al., in preparation).”
• The evolution of the dust temperatures of galaxies in the SFR–M∗ plane up to z ~ 2 (2013, background): “Here, we fixed β = 1.5 because it will provide fair comparisons with most high-redshift studies in which the lack of (sub)mm observations does not allow clear constraints on β A86, page 6 of 22 B. Magnelli et al.: Dust temperature properties of galaxies in the SFR−M∗ plane and in which the effective”