The mass evolution of the first galaxies: stellar mass functions and star formation rates at 4 < z < 7 in the CANDELS GOODS-South field

By K. Duncan, Christopher J. Conselice, A. Mortlock, William G. Hartley, Yicheng Guo, H. Ferguson, R. Dav'e, Yu Lu, J. Ownsworth, M. Ashby and 9 more. 2014

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We measure new estimates for the galaxy stellar mass function and star formation rates for samples of galaxies at $z \sim 4,~5,~6~\&~7$ using data in the CANDELS GOODS South field. The deep near-infrared observations allow us to construct the stellar mass function at $z \geq 6$ directly for the first time. We estimate stellar masses for our sample by fitting the observed spectral energy distributions with synthetic stellar populations, including nebular line and continuum emission. The observed UV luminosity functions for the samples are consistent with previous observations, however we find that the observed $M_{UV}$ - M$_{*}$ relation has a shallow slope more consistent with a constant mass to light ratio and a normalisation which evolves with redshift. Our stellar mass functions have steep low-mass slopes ($\alpha \approx -1.9$), steeper than previously observed at these redshifts and closer to that of the UV luminosity function. Integrating our new mass functions, we find the observed stellar mass density evolves from $\log_{10} \rho_{*} = 6.64^{+0.58}_{-0.89}$ at $z \sim 7$ to $7.36\pm0.06$ $\text{M}_{\odot} \text{Mpc}^{-3}$ at $z \sim 4$. Finally, combining the measured UV continuum slopes ($\beta$) with their rest-frame UV luminosities, we calculate dust corrected star-formation rates (SFR) for our sample. We find the specific star-formation rate for a fixed stellar mass increases with redshift whilst the global SFR density falls rapidly over this period. Our new SFR density estimates are higher than previously observed at this redshift.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e17c10e013ce1e0b7c30bd2f3ce0bfa36d4b331b

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Citations in the corpus

THE EVOLUTION OF GALAXY NUMBER DENSITY AT z < 8 AND ITS IMPLICATIONS (2016, methodology): “To convert our stellar mass limit to a UV magnitude limit we use the relations between these two quantities as calculated in Duncan et al. (2014).”
MUFASA: Galaxy Formation Simulations With Meshless Hydrodynamics (2016, background): “Measurements at higher redshifts are also improving rapidly (e.g. Duncan et al. 2014; Song et al. 2015), though they typically rely on less certain conversions between ultraviolet luminosity and stellar mass. Matching the GSMF and its evolution is thus 4 http://sphgr.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ a…”
Evolution of galaxy stellar masses and star formation rates in the eagle simulations (2014, methodology): “These low masses are not probed by Duncan et al. (2014).”
STELLAR MASSES FROM THE CANDELS SURVEY: THE GOODS-SOUTH AND UDS FIELDS (2014, unknown): “…improve our knowledge of the galaxy stellar mass assembly process, both in a statistical sense (e.g., they allow a robust measure of the galaxy stellar mass functions; Grazian et al. 2015, G15 hereafter, Duncan et al. 2014) and for dedicated analyses of interesting, faint and distant sources.”
Stellar population effects on the inferred photon density at reionization (2015, background): “The recent compilation of observational constraints by Duncan et al. (2014) suggests that the Lyman break galaxy population exhibits no clear evidence for a steepening of β with redshift, and a statistically significant but weak trend with ultraviolet luminosity, with more luminous (MUV ∼ −22)…”
The bolometric quasar luminosity function at z = 0–7 (2020, background): “For the galaxy UV luminosity function (GUVLF), constraints on the faint-end slope come from: observations (Duncan et al. 2014; MNRAS 000, 1–21 (2019)”
The COSMOS2015 galaxy stellar mass function . Thirteen billion years of stellar mass assembly in ten snapshots (2017, methodology): “Some of them, like the present work, collect a galaxy sample where photometric redshifts and stellar mass are derived via SED fitting (“M-selected” SMFs: Santini et al. 2012; Ilbert et al. 2013; Muzzin et al. 2013a; Duncan et al. 2014; Caputi et al. 2015; Stefanon et al. 2015; Grazian et al. 2015).”
The galaxy stellar mass function at 3.5 ≤z ≤ 7.5 in the CANDELS/UDS, GOODS-South, and HUDF fields (2015, methodology): “At z 7 our GSMF slightly differs from the Duncan et al. (2014) one at M ∼ 3 × 1010 M , but this can be due to the low number statistics of the adopted samples.”
The Romulus cosmological simulations: a physical approach to the formation, dynamics and accretion models of SMBHs (2016, background): “The solid blue line shows the total cosmic star formation history in Romulus25 plotted against a fit to observation data from (Behroozi et al. 2013) as well as recent high redshift observations (Kistler et al. 2013; Duncan et al. 2014).”
Constraining the galaxy–halo connection over the last 13.3 Gyr: star formation histories, galaxy mergers and structural properties (2017, methodology): “Based on the best fitting values reported in Table 3 in Duncan et al. (2014) for the slopes and zero points restricted to the brightest galaxies (MUV < −19.5) of the stellar mass-UV luminosity relations, we find the following redshift evolution. log (M∗(MUV)/M ) = −0.19z+9.82−0.45×(MUV+19).”
ALMA SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY IN THE HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD: THE INFRARED EXCESS OF UV-SELECTED z = 2–10 GALAXIES AS A FUNCTION OF UV-CONTINUUM SLOPE AND STELLAR MASS (2016, background): “…et al. (2015), where IRX ∼ 5-6 (drawing values from their Table 2) for sources with UV SFRs of ∼18-33 (corresponding to a stellar mass of log10(M/M⊙) ∼9.8: Duncan et al. 2014), are also consistent with no evolution in the IRX-stellar mass relation to z ∼ 5 (assuming minimal biases from stacking).”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “…observe relatively accurate stellar mass functions not only in the local Universe (e.g. Bernardi et al. 2013, Li & White 2009, Pérez-González et al. 2008) but also towards higher redshifts (e.g. Bouwens et al. 2012, Duncan et al. 2014, Moustakas et al. 2013, Muzzin et al. 2013, Song et al. 2016).”