The Dependence of Star Formation on Galaxy Stellar Mass

By Xianzhong Zheng, Eric F. Bell, C. Papovich, Christian Wolf, K. Meisenheimer, Hans-Walter Rix, G. Rieke, R. Somerville. 2007

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We combine Spitzer 24 μm observations with data from the COMBO-17 survey for ~15,000 0.2 < z ≤ 1 galaxies to determine how the average star formation rates (SFRs) have evolved for galaxy subpopulations of different stellar masses. In the determination of , we consider both the ultraviolet (UV) and the infrared (IR) luminosities, and account for the contributions of galaxies that are individually undetected at 24 μm through image stacking. For all redshifts, we find that higher mass galaxies have a substantially lower specific SFR, ⟨SFR⟩/⟨M*⟩, than lower mass ones. However, we find the striking result that the rate of decline in cosmic SFR with redshift is nearly the same for massive and low mass galaxies, i.e., not a strong function of stellar mass. This analysis confirms one version of what has been referred to as "downsizing," namely, that the epoch of major mass buildup in massive galaxies is substantially earlier than the epoch of mass buildup in low-mass galaxies. Yet it shows that star formation activity is not becoming increasingly limited to low-mass galaxies toward the present epoch. We argue that this suggests that heating by AGN-powered radio jets is not the dominant mechanism responsible for the decline in cosmic SFR since z ~ 1, which is borne out by comparison with semianalytic models that include this effect.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5a77cfae71735d834a2e3356a2cf60ef72dbcd8

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Citations in the corpus

Star Formation and the Growth of Stellar Mass (2007, methodology): “…is impossible to quantify this error until the advent of Herschel Space Observatory, current results suggest that the bulk of intermediateYhigh-redshift galaxies have IR spectra similar to galaxies in the local universe (Appleton et al. 2004; Elbaz et al. 2005; Yan et al. 2005; Zheng et al. 2007a).”
THE DEPENDENCE OF QUENCHING UPON THE INNER STRUCTURE OF GALAXIES AT 0.5 ⩽ z < 0.8 IN THE DEEP2/AEGIS SURVEY (2012, methodology): “Later measurementsof star formation rates confirmed that blue galaxies create stars at a high rate while red galaxies show little to no star formation (Salim et al. 2005, 2007; Noeske et al. 2007; Zheng et al. 2007).”
THE STAR FORMATION MASS SEQUENCE OUT TO z = 2.5 (2012, background): “While it has been shown that higher mass galaxies tend to have lower sSFRs (e.g., Zheng et al. 2007), previous studies have not always distinguished between actively star-forming and passive stellar populations.”
THE GROWTH OF MASSIVE GALAXIES SINCE z = 2 (2009, result): “We note that this is strictly only true if the specific star formation rate (sSFR) is independent of mass, which is in fact not the case (see, e.g., Zheng et al. 2007; Damen et al. 2009).”
A census of metals and baryons in stars in the local universe (2007, background): “…though, that the global SFR has been declining since z ∼ 1 for all galaxies populations, at a rate which is independent of stellar mass, as shown by Zheng et al. (2007) estimating SFRs of ∼15 000 COMBO-17 galaxies from UV and IR luminosities and accounting for individually IR-undetectable…”
THE STAR FORMATION HISTORY OF MASS-SELECTED GALAXIES IN THE COSMOS FIELD (2010, background): “The study of Damen et al. (2009a), which is based on SFRs from 24 µm and UV detections in conjunction with deep K-band observation in the Chandra Deep Field South, is also in broad agreement with the 24 µm stacking analysis of Zheng et al. (2007a) at z < 1 in the same field.”
A POPULATION OF MASSIVE, LUMINOUS GALAXIES HOSTING HEAVILY DUST-OBSCURED GAMMA-RAY BURSTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE USE OF GRBs AS TRACERS OF COSMIC STAR FORMATION (2013, result): “…et al. (2011) that the cosmic SFR is dominated by moderate- to high-mass galaxies (& 1010 M⊙) at z ≈ 1 has been supported by other recent work (Zheng et al. 2007; Santini et al. 2009), some other studies (in particular, optically selected samples) do suggest a larger role for star…”
UniverseMachine: The correlation between galaxy growth and dark matter halo assembly from z = 0−10 (2018, background): “…Robotham & Driver (2011) 0-0.1 UV 833 I Salim et al. (2007) 0-0.2 UV 741 Gunawardhana et al. (2013) 0-0.35 Hα 144 IN Ly et al. (2011a) 0.8 Hα 0.8 I Zheng et al. (2007) 0.2-1 UV/IR 0.46 Rujopakarn et al. (2010) 0-1.2 FIR 0.4-9 I Drake et al. (2015) 0.6-1.5 [OII] 0.63 N Shim et al. (2009) 0.7-1.9…”
The Stellar Mass Assembly of Galaxies from z = 0 to z = 4: Analysis of a Sample Selected in the Rest-Frame Near-Infrared with Spitzer (2007, background): “The evolution at z<1 is very similar for all the stellar mass intervals, as already noted by Zheng et al. (2007), with a change of about a factor of 10 in this period of ∼8 Gyr.”
WHAT TURNS GALAXIES OFF? THE DIFFERENT MORPHOLOGIES OF STAR-FORMING AND QUIESCENT GALAXIES SINCE z ∼ 2 FROM CANDELS (2011, background): “The slope and scatter of this relationship is well-documented and studied (e.g., Salim et al. 2005; Zheng et al. 2007; Noeske et al. 2007; Karim et al. 2011); it is a remarkable coincidence that the zero point in terms of 24µm flux varies so little with redshift, owing to the interplay between the…”
The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO Survey: the QSO luminosity function at 0.4 < z < 2.6 (2009, background): “The galaxy population is also seen to undergo a similar downsizing (Cowie et al. 1996), where the most massive galaxies formed the bulk of their stars earlier than lower mass galaxies (e.g. Juneau et al. 2005; Noeske et al. 2007; Zheng et al. 2007).”
Structure and Star Formation in Galaxies out to z = 3: Evidence for Surface Density Dependent Evolution and Upsizing (2008, background): “The evolution of the star formation rate is generally found to be dependent on mass: the most massive galaxies stopped forming stars the earliest (also known as down-sizing, e.g., Cowie et al. 1996, Brichmann & Ellis, 2000, Juneau et al. 2005, Zheng et al. 2007) Fig.”
THE AVERAGE STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF GALAXIES IN DARK MATTER HALOS FROM z = 0–8 (2012, methodology): “05− 0.2 UV 741 deg2 Zheng et al. (2007a) 0.2− 1 UV/IR 0.458 deg2 I Twite et al. (2012) 1 Hα 1.4 deg2 Noeske et al. (2007) 0.2− 1.1 UV/IR 0.5 deg2 I Tadaki et al. (2011) 2.2 Hα 0.0156 deg2 I Whitaker et al. (2012) 0− 2.5 UV/IR 0.4 deg2 Daddi et al. (2007) 1.4− 2.5 UV-1.”
LSD: Lyman-break galaxies Stellar populations and Dynamics – I. Mass, metallicity and gas at z∼ 3.1 (2009, background): “While some authors (Daddi et al. 2007) find SFRs proportional to M∗, i.e. specific SFR (SSFR = SFR/M∗) constant with mass, in most cases a much weaker dependence of SFR on M∗ is found (Noeske et al. 2007; Zheng et al. 2007; Drory & Alvarez 2008).”
GALAXY PAIRS IN THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY. I. STAR FORMATION, ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS FRACTION, AND THE LUMINOSITY/MASS–METALLICITY RELATION (2008, background): “Recently, Zheng et al. (2007) have shown convincingly that SSFR, i.e. SFR per unit mass, is higher for lower-mass galaxies.”
Cosmic evolution of submillimeter galaxies and their contribution to stellar mass assembly (2009, unknown): “…mid-IR Mann et al. (2002) 0.100 0.100 0.0175 0.0049 0.0049 mid-IR Pozzi et al. (2004) 0.300 0.100 0.0301 0.0140 0.0140 mid-IR Pozzi et al. (2004) 0.300 0.100 0.0197 0.0067 0.0066 mid-IR Zheng et al. (2007) 0.500 0.100 0.0349 0.0088 0.0088 mid-IR Zheng et al. (2007) 0.700 0.100 0.0570 0.0096…”
The many manifestations of downsizing: hierarchical galaxy formation models confront observations (2009, methodology): “…from the literature: local points from SDSS+GALEX from Schiminovich et al. (2007); the results of Conselice et al. (2007), based on the Palomar/DEEP2 Survey; estimates from stacked 24 μm flux from the COMBO-17 survey (Zheng et al. 2007) and estimates from UV luminosity alone (Mobasher et al. 2009).”
Galactic star formation and accretion histories from matching galaxies to dark matter haloes (2012, background): “…van der Burg et al. 2010; Bouwens et al. 2009; Robotham & Driver 2011; Bouwens et al. 2011; Cucciati et al. 2012), Hα (Ly et al. 2011), both UV and IR (Zheng et al. 2007), the FIR (Rujopakarn et al. 2010) and from radio observations (Smolčić et al. 2009; Dunne et al. 2009; Karim et al. 2011).”
STAR FORMATION AND DUST OBSCURATION AT z ≈ 2: GALAXIES AT THE DAWN OF DOWNSIZING (2009, background): “…locally well established, anticorrelation between specific star formation rate and stellar mass up to high redshift (e.g. Junea et al. 2005; Feulner et al. 2005; Bauer et al. 2005; Erb et al. 2006; Noeske et al. 2007; Zheng et al. 2007; Cowie & Barger 2008; Damen et al. 2009; Davies et al. 2009).”
THE EMISSION BY DUST AND STARS OF NEARBY GALAXIES IN THE HERSCHEL KINGFISH SURVEY (2011, methodology): “For comparison, we also estimate SFRs using IR and UV luminosities, which is a complementary way to account for both obscured and unobscured star formation (e.g., Zheng et al. 2007; Buat et al. 2007).”