Star Formation and the Growth of Stellar Mass

By Eric F. Bell, Xianzhong Zheng, C. Papovich, A. Borch, Christian Wolf, K. Meisenheimer. 2007

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent observations have demonstrated a significant growth in the integrated stellar mass of the red sequence since z = 1, dominated by a steadily increasing number of galaxies with stellar masses M* < 1011 M☉. In this paper, we use the COMBO-17 photometric redshift survey in conjunction with deep Spitzer 24 μm data to explore the relationship between star formation and the growth of stellar mass. We calculate star formation rate functions in four different redshift slices, also splitting them into contributions from the red sequence and blue cloud for the first time. We find that the growth of stellar mass since z = 1 is consistent with the integrated star formation rate. Yet, most of the stars formed are in blue cloud galaxies. If the stellar mass already in, and formed in, z < 1 blue cloud galaxies were to stay in the blue cloud, the total stellar mass in blue galaxies would be dramatically overproduced. We explore the expected evolution of stellar mass functions, finding that in this picture the number of massive M* > 3 × 1010 M☉ blue galaxies would also be overproduced; i.e., most of the new stars formed in blue cloud galaxies are in the massive galaxies. We explore a simple truncation scenario in which these "extra" blue galaxies have their star formation suppressed by an unspecified mechanism or mechanisms; simple cessation of star formation in these extra blue galaxies is approximately sufficient to build up the red sequence at M* ≲ 1011 M☉.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be2719bae315a6a2ec3d6ddd727cb14634a39195

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Citations in the corpus

MASS AND ENVIRONMENT AS DRIVERS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION IN SDSS AND zCOSMOS AND THE ORIGIN OF THE SCHECHTER FUNCTION (2010, background): “…We therefore argue that the observed evolution of the mass-function of star-forming galaxies, i.e. constant M* and a gradually increasing ϕ* (Bell et al 2007, Pérez-González et al., 2008, Pozzetti et al., 2009, Ilbert et al., 2010) demands the remarkably simple form (17) for the…”
The UV-Optical Color Magnitude Diagram. II. Physical Properties and Morphological Evolution On and Off of a Star-forming Sequence (2007, background): “Evidence suggests that the stellar mass function of the SF sequence has remained relatively constant with time (Faber et al. 2007; Bell et al. 2007, etc.) Therefore we would expect that star-forming galaxies should not be moving from the SF sequence any faster than the rate at which new stars are…”
MASS AND ENVIRONMENT AS DRIVERS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION. II. THE QUENCHING OF SATELLITE GALAXIES AS THE ORIGIN OF ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS (2011, background): “M* of the Schechter function) does not change significantly since z ~ 2 (e.g. Bell et al. 2007; Pozzetti et al. 2010; Ilbert et al. 2010), despite the large, two order of magnitude, increase in the stellar masses of star-forming galaxies that are not quenched, requires that the mass-quenching must…”
THE GREATER IMPACT OF MERGERS ON THE GROWTH OF MASSIVE GALAXIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR MASS ASSEMBLY AND EVOLUTION SINCE z ≃ 1 (2009, background): “…early completion of star formation in the most massive galaxies, followed by continued activity in lower-mass systems—a phenomenon now termed “downsizing” (e.g., Juneau et al. 2005; Treu et al. 2005; Bundy et al. 2006; Borch et al. 2006; Cimatti et al. 2006; Bell et al. 2007; Cowie & Barger 2008).”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “…and mass density of quiescent galaxies has been increasing over time since z ∼ 2, while the number and mass density of star forming galaxies has stayed roughly constant or decreased during this same interval (Bell et al. 2004, 2007, Brammer et al. 2011, Faber et al. 2007, Muzzin et al. 2013).”
THE CONTRIBUTION OF STARBURSTS AND NORMAL GALAXIES TO INFRARED LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS AT z < 2 (2012, methodology): “…d’Astrophysique, Orme des Merisiers, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France The stellar MF of SFGs is well-fitted by a Schechter function (e.g., Bell et al. 2007, Ilbert et al. 2010), whereas the IR LF (used here as proxy for the SFR distribution) is generally parameterized as a…”
The STAGES view of red spirals and dusty red galaxies: Mass-dependent quenching of star formation in cluster infall (2008, unknown): “Our 3σ detection limit of 58 μJy corresponds to an IR-only SFR of 0.14 M yr−1 at the cluster redshift z = 0.167 (for more details see Bell et al. 2007; G08).”
Star formation and mass assembly in high-redshift galaxies (2009, background): “Papovich et al. (2004) and subsequent papers (e.g., Le Floc’h et al. 2005; Pérez-González et al.2005; Papovich et al. 2006; Marcillac et al. 2006; Bell et al. 2007)estimated that the source detection in MIPS-CDFS is 80% complete at 83µJy or so, which typically corresponds toS/N ∼ 28− 30 in our…”
Structural properties of pseudo-bulges, classical bulges and elliptical galaxies: a Sloan Digital Sky Survey perspective (2008, background): “…follow a tight colour–magnitude relation, in the sense that more luminous galaxies are redder, known as the red sequence, whereas others spread beside the red sequence, originating a swarm of points known as the blue cloud (see e.g. Gladders et al. 1998; Bell et al. 2007, and references therein).”
THE STAR FORMATION HISTORY OF MASS-SELECTED GALAXIES IN THE COSMOS FIELD (2010, background): “1.2 (e.g. Noeske et al. 2007b; Elbaz et al. 2007; Bell et al. 2007; Walcher et al. 2008) and further out to z ≈ 2.5 (Daddi et al. 2007; Pannella et al. 2009).13 Consequently the stellar mass normalized SFR (hereafter specific SFR or SSFR), i.e. the SFR at a given epoch divided by the stellar mass…”
MODELING THE METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION OF GLOBULAR CLUSTERS (2010, methodology): “(9) Such a slower evolution of the stellar mass is consistent with the observational studies of Borch et al. (2006), Bell et al. (2007), and Dahlen et al. (2007).”
THE NUMBER DENSITY AND MASS DENSITY OF STAR-FORMING AND QUIESCENT GALAXIES AT 0.4 ⩽ z ⩽ 2.2 (2011, background): “Consistent with previous studies at lower redshift (Borch et al. 2006; Bell et al. 2007; Martin et al. 2007), we find that the mass density of the star-forming population shows very little evolution up toz∼ 2 for galaxies with logM/M⊙ ∼ 10.6.”
HISTORY OF GALAXY INTERACTIONS AND THEIR IMPACT ON STAR FORMATION OVER THE LAST 7 Gyr FROM GEMS (2009, methodology): “Such advanced mergers have a single redshift (Wolf et al. 2004), stellar mass M∗ (Borch et al. 2006), and UVbased star formation rate (Bell et al. 2005, 2007) determined from the COMBO-17 ground-based data of resolution ∼ 1.”
PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, background): “As emphasized by Bell et al. (2007), this stellar mass scale appears to be important because both the stellar mass-weighted star-formation rate density in galaxies, and the stellar mass growth of the quiescent galaxy population peak around this stellar mass at z < 1; however, the underlying…”
GALAXY STELLAR MASS FUNCTIONS FROM ZFOURGE/CANDELS: AN EXCESS OF LOW-MASS GALAXIES SINCE z = 2 AND THE RAPID BUILDUP OF QUIESCENT GALAXIES (2013, background): “These results are consistent with previous work which has generally found that the star-forming SMF evolves relatively weakly with redshift (Bell et al. 2007; Pozzetti et al. 2010; Brammer et al. 2011; Muzzin et al. 2013).”
The evolution of stellar mass and the implied star formation history (2008, result): “This is consistent with the findings of recent study of Bell et al. (2007) (a study included in our compilation) who find that the instantaneous SFH (from Hopkins 2004) correctly matches the assembly of stellar mass over this redshift range.”
A HIGHLY CONSISTENT FRAMEWORK FOR THE EVOLUTION OF THE STAR-FORMING “MAIN SEQUENCE” FROM z ∼ 0–6 (2014, background): “This has been linked to the rapid quenching of star formation (Bell et al. 2007; Brammer et al. 2011; Ilbert et al. 2013; M13) and the “downsizing paradigm”6 for galaxy evolution (Cowie et al. 1988).”
A census of metals and baryons in stars in the local universe (2007, background): “We note that Bell et al. (2007), accounting for both unobscured (from UV) and dustobscured (from IR) star formation, find agreement between the integral of the SFH and the measured stellar mass density.”