A CANDELS–3D-HST SYNERGY: RESOLVED STAR FORMATION PATTERNS AT 0.7 < z < 1.5

By S. Wuyts, N. F. Förster Schreiber, E. Nelson, P. V. van Dokkum, G. Brammer, Yu-Yen Chang, S. Faber, H. Ferguson, M. Franx, M. Fumagalli and 13 more. 2013

169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze the resolved stellar populations of 473 massive star-forming galaxies at 0.7 < z < 1.5, with multi-wavelength broadband imaging from CANDELS and Hα surface brightness profiles at the same kiloparsec resolution from 3D-HST. Together, this unique data set sheds light on how the assembled stellar mass is distributed within galaxies, and where new stars are being formed. We find the Hα morphologies to resemble more closely those observed in the ACS I band than in the WFC3 H band, especially for the larger systems. We next derive a novel prescription for Hα dust corrections, which accounts for extra extinction toward H ii regions. The prescription leads to consistent star formation rate (SFR) estimates and reproduces the observed relation between the Hα/UV luminosity ratio and visual extinction, on both a pixel-by-pixel and a galaxy-integrated level. We find the surface density of star formation to correlate with the surface density of assembled stellar mass for spatially resolved regions within galaxies, akin to the so-called “main sequence of star formation” established on a galaxy-integrated level. Deviations from this relation toward lower equivalent widths are found in the inner regions of galaxies. Clumps and spiral features, on the other hand, are associated with enhanced Hα equivalent widths, bluer colors, and higher specific SFRs compared to the underlying disk. Their Hα/UV luminosity ratio is lower than that of the underlying disk, suggesting that the ACS clump selection preferentially picks up those regions of elevated star formation activity that are the least obscured by dust. Our analysis emphasizes that monochromatic studies of galaxy structure can be severely limited by mass-to-light ratio variations due to dust and spatially inhomogeneous star formation histories.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ac71b97d63d670e203505dce970cf0ef432d21c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

In Instrumentation

1. P. V. van Dokkum
2. M. Franx
3. A. Dekel
4. P. Hopkins
5. C. Conroy
6. L. Hernquist
7. I. Labbé
8. R. Somerville

Citations in the corpus

• THE MOSDEF SURVEY: MEASUREMENTS OF BALMER DECREMENTS AND THE DUST ATTENUATION CURVE AT REDSHIFTS z ∼ 1.4–2.6 (2015, background): “…attenuation of the gas versus the stellar continuum, again with most studies assuming that the same attenuation curve applies for both the stars and gas (e.g., Förster Schreiber et al. 2009; Yoshikawa et al. 2010; Wuyts et al. 2011; Kashino et al. 2013; Wuyts et al. 2013; Price et al. 2014).”
• EVIDENCE FOR WIDE-SPREAD ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS-DRIVEN OUTFLOWS IN THE MOST MASSIVE z ∼ 1–2 STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2014, background): “…SEDs (Section 2.1) and accounting for extra attenuation toward the nebular gas following the recipe AV,gas = AV,stars × (1.9 − 0.15 × AV ,stars) found by Wuyts et al. (2013) as a best fit for the spatially resolved rest-UV to optical SEDs and Hα data of z = 0.5–1.5 SFGs from the 3D-HST survey…”
• The KMOS Redshift One Spectroscopic Survey (KROSS):dynamical properties, gas and dark matter fractions of typical z~1 star-forming galaxies (2016, methodology): “This stellar based AV is converted to an extinction appropriate to the gas using the relation from Wuyts et al. (2013), AV gas = AV SED(1.9 − 0.15 AV SED), (1) which is consistent with the ratio of H α-to-far-infrared derived SFRs from a stacking analysis of Herschel/SPIRE observations of the KROSS…”
• The COSMOS2015 galaxy stellar mass function . Thirteen billion years of stellar mass assembly in ten snapshots (2017, methodology): “We assume for nebular emission the same dust attenuation as for stars (Reddy et al. 2010; Kashino et al. 2013) although the issue is still debated (Förster Schreiber et al. 2009; Wuyts et al. 2013).”
• Structural and Star-forming Relations since z ∼ 3: Connecting Compact Star-forming and Quiescent Galaxies (2015, background): “The latter play an important role increasing the central density in SFGs that already exhibit relatively quiescent centers, i.e., lacking enough star-formation to sustain the core growth required to reach ΣQ1 (Wuyts et al. 2012, 2013; Lang et al. 2014; Bruce et al. 2014b,a).”
• GOODS-HERSCHEL: STAR FORMATION, DUST ATTENUATION, AND THE FIR–RADIO CORRELATION ON THE MAIN SEQUENCE OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES UP TO z ≃ 4 (2014, result): “Erb et al. (2006) and Reddy et al. (2010) claimed a vanishing diference, i.e. a factor close to 1, atz ≃2 but this has not been confirmed by more recent studies (e.g., Förster Schreiber et al. 2009; Mancini et al. 2011; Wuyts et al. 2013).”
• THE KMOS3D SURVEY: DESIGN, FIRST RESULTS, AND THE EVOLUTION OF GALAXY KINEMATICS FROM 0.7 ⩽ z ⩽ 2.7 (2014, unknown): “…stellar populations, dust extinction and stellar mass maps that will complement the kinematics, star formation and nebular emission data derived from KMOS for a combined view of resolved gas and stellar profiles of individual galaxies (Wuyts et al. 2012, 2013; Nelson et al. 2013; Lang et al. 2014).”
• CONSTRAINING THE LOW-MASS SLOPE OF THE STAR FORMATION SEQUENCE AT 0.5 < z < 2.5 (2014, methodology): “Following Wuyts et al. (2013), we assume that [N ii] contributes 15% of the measured Hα emission line flux such that the [N ii]/(Hα+[N ii]) ratio equals 0.15.”
• The SINS/zC-SINF Survey of z ∼ 2 Galaxy Kinematics: SINFONI Adaptive Optics–assisted Data and Kiloparsec-scale Emission-line Properties (2018, background): “An important uncertainty in interpreting the sizes and global profiles from Hα (and continuum) emission is the possible effects of spatially-variable dust extinction (e.g., Wuyts et al. 2013; Nelson et al. 2016a).”
• BULGE GROWTH AND QUENCHING SINCE z = 2.5 IN CANDELS/3D-HST (2014, methodology): “Meanwhile, the 3D-HST and CANDELS legacy programs have yielded evidence for nuclear depressions in the Hα equivalent width in z ∼ 1 SFGs (Nelson et al. 2012, 2013; Wuyts et al. 2013).”
• THE 3D-HST SURVEY: HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE WFC3/G141 GRISM SPECTRA, REDSHIFTS, AND EMISSION LINE MEASUREMENTS FOR ∼100,000 GALAXIES (2015, background): “Wuyts et al. (2013) compare the spatial distribution of Hα emission in a sample of relatively bright galaxies to that of the rest-frame UV emission.”