The COMBO-17 survey: Evolution of the galaxy luminosity function from 25,000 galaxies with 0.2 < z < 1.2

By Christian Wolf, K. Meisenheimer, Hans-Walter Rix, A. Borch, S. Dye, M. Kleinheinrich. 2002

349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a detailed empirical assessment of how the galaxy luminosity function and stellar luminosity density evolves over the last half of the universe's age (0.2 < z < 1.2) for galaxies of different spectral energy distributions (SED). The results are based on ∼25 000 galaxies (R < 24) with redshift measurements (σz ≈ 0.03) and SEDs across λobs ≈ 350 ... 930 nm. The redshifts and SEDs were derived from medium-band photometry in 17 filters, observed as part of the COMBO-17 survey ("Classifying Objects by Medium-Band Observations in 17 Filters") over three disjoint fields with a total area of 0.78 square degrees. Luminosity functions (LF), binned in redshift and SED-type, are presented in the restframe passbands of the SDSS r-band, the Johnson B-band and a synthetic UV continuum band at 280 nm. We find that the luminosity function depends strongly on SED-type at all redshifts covered. The shape of the LF, i.e. the faint-end power-law slope, does depend on SED type, but not on redshift. However, the redshift evolution of the characteristic luminosity M ∗ and density φ ∗ depends strongly on SED-type: (1) Early-type galaxies, defined as redder than a present-day reference Sa spectrum, become drastically more abundant towards low redshift, by a factor of 10 in the number density φ ∗ from z = 1.1 to now, and by a factor of 4 in their contribution to the co-moving r-band luminosity density, jr. (2) Galaxies resembling present-day Sa- to Sbc-colours show a co-moving number density and contribution to jr that does not vary much with redshift. (3) Galaxies with blue spectra reflecting strong star formation decrease towards low redshift both in luminosity and density, and by a factor of 4 in their jr contribution. Summed over all SED types and galaxy luminosities, the comoving luminosity density decreases towards low redshift, between z = 1.1 and now, by a small amount in restframe r and B, but by a factor of ∼6 in restframe 280 nm. At z = 1.1, galaxies redder than Sbc's, contribute 40% to the total jr, which increases to 75% by z = 0. For λrest =280 nm, this increase is from 12% to 25% over the same redshift interval. Comparison of the three independent sight-lines shows that our results are not significantly affected by large-scale structure. Our lowest redshift bin at z = (0.2, 0.4) largely agrees with the recent assessment of the present-day galaxy population by SDSS and 2dFGRS and deviates only by an excess of "faint blue galaxies" at z ∼ 0.3 compared to very local samples. Overall our findings provide a set of new and much more precise constraints to model the waning of overall star formation activity, the demise of star-bursts and the strong emergence of "old" galaxies, with hardly any young population, over the last 6-8 Gigayears.

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Citations in the corpus

THE PRISM MULTI-OBJECT SURVEY (PRIMUS). I. SURVEY OVERVIEW AND CHARACTERISTICS (2010, methodology): “Having somewhat higher resolution allows COMBO-17 to identify the spectral energy distribution (SED) breaks more accurately, thereby improving their redshift precision to ∼3% and reducing the number of outliers.”
The VIMOS VLT deep survey: the assembly history of the stellar mass in galaxies: from the young to the old universe (2007, unknown): “We have compared our MF determination with literature results based on different surveys (K20, COMBO17, MUSIC, DEEP2, FDF+CDFS), rescaled to the Chabrier IMF (see Fig.”
The VIMOS-VLT deep survey - Evolution of the galaxy luminosity function up to z = 2 in first epoch data (2004, unknown): “The Schechter parameters of the COMBO-17 global LF are available in the online material of the paper (Wolf et al. 2003).”
THE MULTIWAVELENGTH SURVEY BY YALE–CHILE (MUSYC): DEEP MEDIUM-BAND OPTICAL IMAGING AND HIGH-QUALITY 32-BAND PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFTS IN THE ECDF-S (2010, methodology): “Rest-frame fluxes were computed following the procedure of Brammer et al. (2009), which measures the restframe fluxes from the best-fitting template (Wolf et al. 2003).”
CONNECTING THE GAMMA RAY BURST RATE AND THE COSMIC STAR FORMATION HISTORY: IMPLICATIONS FOR REIONIZATION AND GALAXY EVOLUTION (2011, methodology): “…& Beacom (2006) who gathered and standardized measures of the star formation rate density from the Hopkins (2004) compilation and observations by Wolf et al. (2003), Bouwens et al. (2003a,b), Bunker et al. (2004), Ouchi et al. (2004), Arnouts et al. (2005), Le Floc’h et al. (2005),…”
Constraints on a Universal Stellar Initial Mass Function from Ultraviolet to Near-Infrared Galaxy Luminosity Densities (2003, result): “This is consistent with the results obtained by Wolf et al. (2003) for the 0.28 lm UV at z ¼ 0:3, with about 75%/90% contribution from late spectral types (3–4/2–4).”
DISSECTING PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFT FOR ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS USING XMM- AND CHANDRA-COSMOS SAMPLES (2011, background): “…under study, the use of intermediate-band filters that help to increase the spectral resolution of the measured spectral energy distribution (SEDs) (Wolf et al. 2001, 2003; Salvato et al. 2009; Ilbert et al. 2009; Cardamone et al. 2010)), and the inclusion of emission lines in the template SEDs of…”
Photometric redshifts for the CFHTLS T0004 deep and wide fields (2008, background): “Some recent photometric redshift studies, like the COMBO-17 survey (Wolf et al. 2003), CFHTLS (Ilbert et al. 2006, hereafter I06), SWIRE (Rowan-Robinson et al. 2008), or COSMOS (Mobasher et al. 2007, Ilbert et al. 2008), contain up to 1,000,000 galaxies as faint as i ∼ 25.”
Deep GALEX Imaging of the COSMOS HST Field: A First Look at the Morphology of z ~ 0.7 Star-forming Galaxies (2007, methodology): “Studies of B and R-band luminosity functions derived from the DEEP2 (Faber et al. 2005) and COMBO-17 (Bell et al. 2004; Wolf et al. 2003) surveys similarly point towards such a scenario.”
Spitzer Observations of Massive, Red Galaxies at High Redshift (2005, background): “The GTO Spitzer MIPS 24 m imaging intersects roughly 700 arcmin2 of the COMBO-17 survey (Wolf et al. 2003) in a substantially larger region encompassing the 130 arcmin2 GOODS-S field.”
THE DEAD SEQUENCE: A CLEAR BIMODALITY IN GALAXY COLORS FROM z = 0 to z = 2.5 (2009, methodology): “We compute rest-frame U − V colors from the best-fit EAZY template in a similar way as done by Wolf et al. (2003) for COMBO-17.”
On the Normalization of the Cosmic Star Formation History (2006, methodology): “3 these consist of FIR (24µm) photometry from the Spitzer Space Telescope (Pérez-González et al. 2005; Le Floc’h et al. 2005), and UV measurements from the SDSS (Baldry et al. 2005), GALEX (Arnouts et al. 2005; Schiminovich 2005) and the COMBO17 project (Wolf et al. 2003).”
The Dependence of Star Formation on Galaxy Stellar Mass (2007, background): “THE DATA AND GALAXY SAMPLES The COMBO-17 survey (Wolf et al. 2003) has imaged three 30′ × 30′ fields in five broad and 12 intermediate optical bands from 350 to 930 nm with the goal of deriving high-quality photometric redshifts4 for> 10 000 galaxies with mR < 24 mag in each field.”
Cosmological baryonic and matter densities from 600 000 SDSS luminous red galaxies with photometric redshifts (2006, methodology): “The rms precision σ z with which galaxy redshifts may be determined varies with the method and filter set used, together with the galaxy type, magnitude and redshift, but at best is currently σ 0 ≡ σz/(1 + z) ∼ 0.03 (e.g. COMBO-17; Wolf et al. 2003).”
J-PLUS: The Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (2015, background): “Surveys such as COMBO-17, COSMOS, ALHAMBRA or SHARDS have used a combination of broad, medium and narrow-band filters to increase the sensitivity to emission-lines with moderate equivalent widths, providing photo-z estimates as accurate as δz/(1+z) 0.01 for high signalto-noise galaxies.”
COSMOS PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFTS WITH 30-BANDS FOR 2-deg2 (2008, background): “Deep photo-z samples such as COMBO-17 (Wolf et al. 2003), CFHTLS (Ilbert et al. 2006), SWIRE (RowanRobinson et al. 2008), and COSMOS (Mobasher et al. 2007) contain more than 1,000,000 galaxies and go as faint as i ∼ 25 with a relatively small amount of telescope time.”
The Chandra Deep Field-South: Optical Spectroscopy. I. (2003, methodology): “An even larger field than the CDFS has been surveyed with the HSTACS program GEMS and has also been covered by multiband optical photometry as part of the COMBO-17 survey (Wolf et al. 2003).”
The VIMOS VLT Deep Survey. Evolution of the luminosity functions by galaxy type up to z = 1.5 from first epoch data (2005, unknown): “Wolf et al. (2003) used a sample of ∼25 000 galaxies with photometric redshifts, applying a classification scheme in four classes similar to ours but using the Kinney et al. (1996) templates instead of the CWW templates.”