The COSMOS2015 galaxy stellar mass function . Thirteen billion years of stellar mass assembly in ten snapshots

By I. Davidzon, O. Ilbert, C. Laigle, Jean Coupon, H. McCracken, I. Delvecchio, D. Masters, P. Capak, B. Hsieh, O. Fèvre and 14 more. 2017

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We measure the stellar mass function (SMF) and stellar mass density of galaxies in the COSMOS field up to z ~ 6. We select them in the near-IR bands of the COSMOS2015 catalogue, which includes ultra-deep photometry from UltraVISTA-DR2, SPLASH, and Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam. At z > 2.5 we use new precise photometric redshifts with error σ_z = 0.03(1 + z) and an outlier fraction of 12%, estimated by means of the unique spectroscopic sample of COSMOS (~100 000 spectroscopic measurements in total, more than one thousand having robust z_(spec)> 2.5). The increased exposure time in the DR2, along with our panchromatic detection strategy, allow us to improve the completeness at high z with respect to previous UltraVISTA catalogues (e.g. our sample is >75% complete at 10^(10)M⊙ and z = 5). We also identify passive galaxies through a robust colour–colour selection, extending their SMF estimate up to z = 4. Our work provides a comprehensive view of galaxy-stellar-mass assembly between z = 0.1 and 6, for the first time using consistent estimates across the entire redshift range. We fit these measurements with a Schechter function, correcting for Eddington bias. We compare the SMF fit with the halo mass function predicted from ΛCDM simulations, finding that at z > 3 both functions decline with a similar slope in thehigh-mass end. This feature could be explained assuming that mechanisms quenching star formation in massive haloes become less effective at high redshifts; however further work needs to be done to confirm this scenario. Concerning the SMF low-mass end, it shows a progressive steepening as it moves towards higher redshifts, with α decreasing from -1.47^(+0.02)_(-0.02) at z ≃ 0.1 to -2.11^(+0.30)_(-0.13) at z ≃ 5. This slope depends on the characterisation of the observational uncertainties, which is crucial to properly remove the Eddington bias. We show that there is currently no consensus on the method to quantify such errors: different error models result in different best-fit Schechter parameters.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5145a5517dbf41bdce9ddc495c9337f26b6a9e3

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Citations in the corpus

COSMOS2020: A Panchromatic View of the Universe to z ∼ 10 from Two Complementary Catalogs (2021, methodology): “This bias has already been discussed for COSMOS2015 (see Davidzon et al. 2017) and it is now more relevant after the addition of the i band in the CHI MEAN image which was not considered in 2015.”
Characterizing the Fast Radio Burst Host Galaxy Population and its Connection to Transients in the Local and Extragalactic Universe (2021, methodology): “We used the double Schechter function to model GSMF for all, star-forming, and passive galaxies in the redshift range 0.2< z< 0.5 in the COSMOS field (Davidzon et al. 2017).”
Host Galaxy Properties and Offset Distributions of Fast Radio Bursts: Implications for Their Progenitors (2020, methodology): “For this analysis we assume the parameterization of f(Må) derived by Davidzon et al. (2017) for galaxies at 0.2<z<0.5 in the COSMOS field.”