STELLAR MASSES AND STAR FORMATION RATES FOR 1 M GALAXIES FROM SDSS+WISE

By Yu-Yen Chang, A. van der Wel, E. D. Cunha, Hans-Walter Rix. 2015

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We combine Sloan Digitital Sky Survey (SDSS) and WISE photometry for the full SDSS spectroscopic galaxy sample, creating spectral energy distributions (SEDs) that cover λ = 0.4–22 μm for an unprecedentedly large and comprehensive sample of 858,365 present-epoch galaxies. Using MAGPHYS, we then simultaneously and consistently model both the attenuated stellar SED and the dust emission at 12 and 22 μm, producing robust new calibrations for monochromatic mid-IR star formation rate (SFR) proxies. These modeling results provide the first mid-IR-based view of the bimodality in star formation activity among galaxies, exhibiting the sequence of star-forming galaxies (“main sequence”) with a slope of d log SFR / d log M * = ?> 0.80 and a scatter of 0.39 dex. We find that these new SFRs along the SF main sequence are systematically lower by a factor of 1.4 than those derived from optical spectroscopy. We show that for most present-day galaxies, the 0.4–22 μm SED fits can exquisitely predict the fluxes measured by Herschel at much longer wavelengths. Our analysis also illustrates that the majority of stars in the present-day universe are formed in luminous galaxies ( ∼ L * ?> ) in and around the “green valley” of the color–luminosity plane. We make publicly available the matched photometry catalog and SED modeling results.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64af6212b6204e29936e5f427a2207c001b5c501

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Citations in the corpus

GALEX–SDSS–WISE LEGACY CATALOG (GSWLC): STAR FORMATION RATES, STELLAR MASSES, AND DUST ATTENUATIONS OF 700,000 LOW-REDSHIFT GALAXIES (2016, methodology): “Stellar plus dust emission modeling is applied in Chang et al. (2015), who use MAGPHYS to perform the SED fitting simultaneously on optical (ugriz) photometry from SDSS and mid-IR photometry from WISE (3.4, 4.6, 12 and 22 µm).”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: the importance of the hydrodynamics scheme (2015, methodology): “For comparison, we show the SSFR inferred from observations in the GAMA survey by Bauer et al. (2013) (grey circles) and observations by Chang et al. (2015) using recalibrated star formation rate indicators based on SDSS+WISE photometry (white squares).”
The eagle simulations of galaxy formation: Public release of halo and galaxy catalogues (2015, result): “Note, however, that the eagle galaxies are in good agreement with the recent recalibration of star formation indicators by Chang et al. (2015) (see Fig.”
Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations (2016, background): “1 to show that our galaxies follow the general trend of the star-forming sequence observed at lowz by Gilbank et al. (2010), Bauer et al. (2013), and Chang et al. (2015), and a set of massive galaxies in group haloes with low sSFR.”
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, unknown): “Many studies use broadband photometry in the MIR to estimate total IR luminosities, either by using fixed IR templates (e.g., Daddi et al. 2007; Wuyts et al. 2008; Buat et al. 2009; Whitaker et al. 2014) or by fitting IR models to a limited wavelength range (e.g., Chang et al. 2015).”
MUFASA: Galaxy Formation Simulations With Meshless Hydrodynamics (2016, result): “…are in very good agreement with recent Hα-based SFR’s from GAMA (Bauer et al. 2013, grey circles), and in reasonable agreement with the SDSS+GALEX data from Salim et al. (2007), However, they are higher than the sSFR’s inferred from full 0.4−22µm SED fitting including WISE data (Chang et al. 2015).”