Star formation rates and masses of z∼ 2 galaxies from multicolour photometry

By C. Maraston, J. Pforr, A. Renzini, E. Daddi, Mark Dickinson, A. Cimatti, C. Tonini. 2010

246 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fitting synthetic spectral energy distributions (SED) to the multi-band photometry of galaxies to derive their star formation rates (SFR), stellar masses, ages, etc. requires making a priori assumptions about their star formation histories (SFH). A widely adopted parameterization of the SFH, the so-called �-models where SFR / e t/� is shown to lead to unrealistically low ages when applied to a sample of actively star forming galaxies at z � 2, a problem shared by other SFHs when the age is left as a free parameter in the fitting procedure. This happens because the SED of such galaxies, at all wavelengths, is dominated by their youngest stellar populations, which outshine the older ones. Thus, the SED of such galaxies conveys little information on the beginning of star formation, i.e., on the age of their oldest stellar populations. To cope with this problem, besides �-models (hereafter called direct-� models), we explore a variety of SFHs, such as constant SFR and inverted-� models (with SFR / e +t/� ), along with various priors on age, including assuming that star formation started at high redshift in all the galaxies in the test sample. We find that inverted-� models with such latter assumption give SFRs and extinctions in excellent agreement with the values derived using only the UV part of the SED, which is the one most sensitive to ongoing star formation and reddening. These models are also shown to accurately recover the SFRs and masses of mock galaxies at z � 2 constructed from semi-analytic models, which we use as a further test. All other explored SFH templates do not fulfil these two test as well as inverted-� models do. In particular, direct-� models with unconstrained age in the fitting procedure overstimate SFRs and underestimate stellar mass, and would exacerbate an apparent mismatch between the cosmic evolution of the volume densities of SFR and stellar mass. We conclude that for high-redshift star forming galaxies an exponentially increasing SFR with a high formation redshift is preferable to other forms of the SFH so far adopted in the literature.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b8372d0f04bfbf297b7f7318a66f3de123a6f8d

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Citations in the corpus

ON STAR FORMATION RATES AND STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF GALAXIES OUT TO z ∼ 3 (2011, background): “We are aware that increasing star formation histories have recently been proposed as more appropriate for galaxy evolution at early times (z & 3, Renzini et al. 2009; Maraston et al. 2010; Papovich et al. 2011), and explore this option further in Section 6.2.2.”
The stellar masses and specific star-formation rates of submillimetre galaxies (2011, background): “Indeed this problem has already been discussed by several authors including Maraston et al. (2010).”
How to Measure Galaxy Star Formation Histories. II. Nonparametric Models (2018, background): “These forms include rising SFHs (Buat et al. 2008; Maraston et al. 2010; Papovich et al. 2011), lognormals (Gladders et al. 2013; Abramson et al. 2015; Diemer et al. 2017), double power-laws (Carnall et al. 2018), and exponentially declining SFHs modified to decouple late-time and early-time SFRs…”
Mass assembly in quiescent and star-forming galaxies since z ≃ 4 from UltraVISTA (2013, background): “However, numerous studies pointed out that such star formation histories could be inappropriate atz > 1 (e.g. Maraston et al. 2010, Pacifici et al. 2013).”
Constraining the properties of AGN host galaxies with spectral energy distribution modelling (2015, methodology): “Furthermore, since the 1-exp-ris model is recommended to only model the SFH of galaxies at z >2 (e.g., Maraston et al. 2010; Papovich et al. 2011; Pforr et al. 2012; Reddy et al. 2012), we do not test it in this work.”
THE STELLAR MASS CONTENT OF SUBMILLIMETER-SELECTED GALAXIES (2010, background): “…instantaneous burst models tend to produce the youngest ages, while the continuous star formation models tend to produce the oldest ages, see, e.g., Maraston et al. 2010), we are also unable to effectively constrain the ages of individual galaxies and thus the appropriate mass-to-light ratio of…”
Stellar population models at high spectral resolution (2011, background): “…two aspects of spectral fitting for age/metallicity determination, namely that: i) the sole consideration of the minimum χ2 is misleading (see Maraston et al. 2010 for a similar argument for the SED-fit of high-redshift galaxies); ii) the age-metallicity degeneracy is perfectly in place and…”
THE LONG LIVES OF GIANT CLUMPS AND THE BIRTH OF OUTFLOWS IN GAS-RICH GALAXIES AT HIGH REDSHIFT (2013, background): “This assumption can somewhat under-estimate the age of stellar populations with more constant SFR histories (Maraston et al. 2010).”
The Herschel* PEP/HerMES luminosity function - I. Probing the evolution of PACS selected Galaxies to z ≃ 4 (2013, result): “…declining SFR might not be the best to reproduce the SFR history of z>1.5 star-forming galaxies (i.e. exponentially increasing or increasing SFR would be better choices, as widely discussed by Maraston et al. 2010 and Reddy et al. 2012), in our specific case it does not affect the results.”
BULGE GROWTH AND QUENCHING SINCE z = 2.5 IN CANDELS/3D-HST (2014, background): “This choice is simplistic and may not be representative of the real SFHs (e.g., for SFGs see Maraston et al. 2010).”
The SINS/zC-SINF Survey of z ∼ 2 Galaxy Kinematics: SINFONI Adaptive Optics–assisted Data and Kiloparsec-scale Emission-line Properties (2018, background): “…up to at least near-IR wavelengths, and for similar model evolutionary tracks and star formation histories, the relative ranking of galaxies in these properties is fairly robust (e.g., Förster Schreiber et al. 2004; Shapley et al. 2005; Wuyts et al. 2007, 2011a; Maraston et al. 2010; M11).”
An Older, More Quiescent Universe from Panchromatic SED Fitting of the 3D-HST Survey (2018, background): “…metallicity has remained a robust feature in the literature over the past two decades (Brinchmann & Ellis 2000; Papovich et al. 2001; Shapley et al. 2001; Ilbert et al. 2006; Salim et al. 2007; Kriek et al. 2009; Maraston et al. 2010; Acquaviva et al. 2011; Skelton et al. 2014; Salmon et al. 2015).”
VALIDATION OF THE EQUILIBRIUM MODEL FOR GALAXY EVOLUTION TO z ∼ 3 THROUGH MOLECULAR GAS AND DUST OBSERVATIONS OF LENSED STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2013, methodology): “These uncertainties are comparable to the typical variations in stellar masses derived though SED modeling under varying assumptions (e.g. Förster Schreiber et al. 2004; Shapley et al. 2005; Maraston et al. 2010).”
HERSCHEL-ATLAS GALAXY COUNTS AND HIGH-REDSHIFT LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS: THE FORMATION OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2011, background): “These galaxies show tight SFR−mass correlations, with small dispersions (Daddi et al. 2007; Pannella et al. 2009; Dunne et al. 2009; Rodighiero et al. 2010; Maraston et al. 2010).”
Enhanced star formation rates in AGN hosts with respect to inactive galaxies from PEP-Herschel observations (2012, methodology): “We therefore repeated the mass estimate by using exponentially increasing star formation histories (i.e. the socalled invertedτ-models, Maraston et al. 2010), which represent the opposite approximation and may resemble better the SFH in AGN hosts galaxies.”
Galaxy evolution in cosmological simulations with outflows ― I. Stellar masses and star formation rates (2011, background): “…gas as it is made available to the ISM (from inflows and outflows); we call this “supply-regulated” star formation, to distinguish it from other scenarios where gas aggregates in or around galaxies before being consumed rapidly (e.g. Eggen, Lynden-Bell, & Sandage 1962; Maraston et al. 2010).”
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): “SFH recovery is critical to accurately recover stellar masses (Lee et al. 2009; Maraston et al. 2010; Pforr et al. 2012), and simple exponentially declining SFHs fail to reproduce the mass function of galaxies at earlier epochs by several orders of magnitude (Wuyts et al. 2011a).”