THE EVOLVING RELATIONS BETWEEN SIZE, MASS, SURFACE DENSITY, AND STAR FORMATION IN 3 × 104 GALAXIES SINCE z = 2

By Rik J. Williams, R. Quadri, M. Franx, P. V. van Dokkum, S. Toft, M. Kriek, I. Labbé. 2009

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The presence of massive, compact, quiescent galaxies at z>2 presents a major challenge for theoretical models of galaxy formation and evolution. Using one of the deepest large public near-IR surveys to date, we investigate in detail the correlations between star formation and galaxy structural parameters (size, stellar mass, and surface density) from z = 2 to the present. At all redshifts, massive quiescent galaxies (i.e., those with little or no star formation) occupy the extreme high end of the surface density distribution and follow a tight mass–size correlation, while star-forming galaxies show a broad range of both densities and sizes. Conversely, galaxies with the highest surface densities comprise a nearly homogeneous population with little or no ongoing star formation, while less dense galaxies exhibit high star formation rates and varying levels of dust obscuration. Both the sizes and surface densities of quiescent galaxies evolve strongly from z = 2–0; we parameterize this evolution for both populations with simple power-law functions and present best-fit parameters for comparison to future theoretical models. Higher-mass quiescent galaxies undergo faster structural evolution, consistent with previous results. Interestingly, star-forming galaxies’ sizes and densities evolve at rates similar to those of quiescent galaxies. It is therefore possible that the same physical processes drive the structural evolution of both populations, suggesting that “dry mergers” may not be the sole culprit in this size evolution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97570b01c61d96fcd770bdffbf80124d5f84fbb5

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. R. Somerville
4. R. Dav'e
5. P. V. van Dokkum
6. A. Dekel
7. T. Naab
8. M. Cappellari

In Instrumentation

1. L. Hernquist
2. P. Hopkins
3. P. V. van Dokkum
4. M. Cappellari
5. A. Dekel
6. R. Somerville
7. R. Dav'e
8. C. Conroy

Citations in the corpus

• How do minor mergers promote inside-out growth of ellipticals, transforming the size, density profile and dark matter fraction? (2012, methodology): “The initial massive host galaxies resemble typical massive and compact ’red nuggets’ at z = 2 which are smaller than typical present day galaxies at 1011M⊙ (red line from Williams et al. 2010).”
• The sizes, masses and specific star formation rates of massive galaxies at 1.3 < z < 1.5: strong evidence in favour of evolution via minor mergers (2012, methodology): “Williams et al. (2010) studied the size evolution of massive galaxies at zphot ≤ 2, using a sample of 30 000 (K < 22.4) galaxies selected from the first data release of the UDS.”
• THE EVOLUTION OF THE GALAXY STELLAR MASS FUNCTION AT z = 4–8: A STEEPENING LOW-MASS-END SLOPE WITH INCREASING REDSHIFT (2015, background): “…that global galaxy properties, such as star formation rate (SFR), metallicity, size, etc., all correlate tightly with the stellar mass (Kauffmann et al. 2003b; Noeske et al. 2007; Tremonti et al. 2004; Williams et al. 2010), implying that the stellar mass plays a major role in galaxy evolution.”
• FORMING COMPACT MASSIVE GALAXIES (2015, background): “As is well known, star forming galaxies are larger than quiescent galaxies at fixed mass (e.g., Franx et al. 2008; Williams et al. 2010; van der Wel et al. 2014b).”
• CAN MINOR MERGING ACCOUNT FOR THE SIZE GROWTH OF QUIESCENT GALAXIES? NEW RESULTS FROM THE CANDELS SURVEY (2011, background): “This figure confirms the results of many previous studies (e.g., Trujillo et al. 2006; Franx et al. 2008; Williams et al. 2010; Weinzirl et al. 2011) but represents an important advance, since it is based on a large, homogeneous sample with space-based sizes uniformly measured in the rest-frame…”
• CONSTRAINTS ON THE ASSEMBLY AND DYNAMICS OF GALAXIES. I. DETAILED REST-FRAME OPTICAL MORPHOLOGIES ON KILOPARSEC SCALE OF z ∼ 2 STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2010, background): “…with both NICMOS/NIC3 from space (Zirm et al. 2007; Toft et al. 2007), and with VLT/ISAAC (Franx et al. 2008; Toft et al. 2009) and UKIRT/WFCAM (Williams et al. 2010) from the ground, it has been shown that quiescent, high redshift galaxies have systematically smaller sizes and higher stellar…”
• THE DENSITY PROFILES OF MASSIVE, RELAXED GALAXY CLUSTERS. I. THE TOTAL DENSITY OVER THREE DECADES IN RADIUS (2012, background): “Furthermore, this scale bears a striking similarity to sizes of the most massive galaxies at high redshift, which many observations now indicate are quite compact (e.g., Trujillo et al. 2006; van Dokkum et al. 2008; Williams et al. 2010; Newman et al. 2012).”
• CANDELS: THE PROGENITORS OF COMPACT QUIESCENT GALAXIES AT z ∼ 2 (2012, background): “In agreement with recent results, we find that SFGs and QGs follow significantly different mass-size relations (Williams et al. 2010; Wuyts et al. 2011b).”
• The star formation activity of IllustrisTNG galaxies: main sequence, UVJ diagram, quenched fractions, and systematics (2018, methodology): “A powerful tool for selecting quiescent galaxies that is extensively used in observations is the color-color diagram, particularly the rest-frame U-V vs.V-J plane (hereafter UVJ diagram; Wuyts et al. 2011; Williams et al. 2009, 2010; Whitaker et al. 2010; Patel et al. 2012; Quadri et al. 2012).”
• ON SIZES, KINEMATICS, M/L GRADIENTS, AND LIGHT PROFILES OF MASSIVE COMPACT GALAXIES AT z ∼ 2 (2010, background): “Likewise, a decrease in the size of star-forming galaxies at a given mass is observationally well established (Trujillo et al. 2006; Franx et al. 2008; Williams et al. 2010).”
• THE MOSFIRE DEEP EVOLUTION FIELD (MOSDEF) SURVEY: REST-FRAME OPTICAL SPECTROSCOPY FOR ∼1500 H-SELECTED GALAXIES AT 1.37 ≤ z ≤ 3.8 ?> (2014, background): “…Williams et al. 2009; Whitaker et al. 2011), the strong clustering of red galaxies (e.g., Quadri et al. 2008), the mass-metallicity relation (e.g., Erb et al. 2006), and the correlation between stellar population properties and structural parameters (e.g., Williams et al. 2010; Wuyts et al. 2011a).”
• On the origin of the galaxy star‐formation‐rate sequence: evolution and scatter (2009, background): “Another caveat is that the sizes measured by Franx et al. (2008) and Williams et al. (2010) are global half-light sizes, whereas our model sizes are disk sizes.”
• The size evolution of star-forming and quenched galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “…property that is found to significantly vary with galaxy mass, color or star-formation activity, and redshift (Shen et al. 2003; Ferguson et al. 2004; Trujillo et al. 2006; Elmegreen et al. 2007; Williams et al. 2010; Mosleh et al. 2012; Ono et al. 2013; van der Wel et al. 2014; Lange et al. 2015).”
• THE COSMOLOGICAL SIZE AND VELOCITY DISPERSION EVOLUTION OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2011, background): “Other published local mass-size relations have slightly different slopes and offsets (see e.g. Hyde & Bernardi 2009; Guo et al. 2009; Williams et al. 2010) which does, however, not affect our general conclusions.”
• A LINK BETWEEN STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND INNER STELLAR MASS DENSITY IN SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY CENTRAL GALAXIES (2013, background): “Indeed, Franx et al. (2008) and Williams et al. (2010) claim to find an evolving threshold surface density that decreases with time7.”
• Structural and Star-forming Relations since z ∼ 3: Connecting Compact Star-forming and Quiescent Galaxies (2015, background): “…and the scatter of the logΣ1 − logM⋆ relation in terms of the slope in the Σe and size-mass relations. β∼ 1 + 0.5c1(α− 1); σ(log Σ1) ∼ 0.5c1σ(log Σe) (7) β∼ 1− c1a; σ(log Σ1) ∼ c1σ(log re) Quiescent galaxies typically have high Sérsic values, n = 3 − 4 (Williams et al. 2010; Bell et al. 2012).”
• 3D-HST+CANDELS: THE EVOLUTION OF THE GALAXY SIZE–MASS DISTRIBUTION SINCE z = 3 (2014, unknown): “Williams et al. (2010) found somewhat faster evolution for late types (and slower evolution for early types), but a direct comparison with their Figure 4 reveals that their and our size measurements are in fact fully consistent over the redshift range 0 .”