2018/09/11 by Kartheik Iyer, Kartheik G. Iyer, Eric Gawiser +10 · 53 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmic time #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy formation and evolution #Low Mass #Redshift #Star formation #Stellar mass #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aae0fa
published in The Astrophysical Journal 866(2), 120 (IOP Publishing) · 22 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ
arxiv created 2018/09/11 · openalex created_date 2018/09/27 · openalex publication_date 2018/10/18 · arxiv updated 2018/11/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract To achieve a fuller understanding of galaxy evolution, SED fitting can be used to recover quantities beyond stellar masses ( M * ) and star formation rates (SFRs). We use star formation histories (SFHs) reconstructed via the Dense Basis method of Iyer & Gawiser for a sample of 17,873 galaxies at 0.5 < z < 6 in the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey GOODS-S field to study the nature and evolution of the SFR– M * correlation. The reconstructed SFHs represent trajectories in SFR– M * space, enabling us to study galaxies at epochs earlier than observed by propagating them backward in time along these trajectories. We study the SFR– M * correlation at z = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 using both direct fits to galaxies observed at those epochs and SFR– M * trajectories of galaxies observed at lower redshifts. The SFR– M * correlations obtained using the two approaches are found to be consistent with each other through a K-S test. Validation tests using SFHs from semi-analytic models and cosmological hydrodynamical simulations confirm the sensitivity of the method to changes in the slope, normalization, and shape of the SFR– M * correlation. This technique allows us to further probe the low-mass regime of the correlation at high z by ∼1 dex and over an effective volume of ∼10× larger than possible with just direct fits. We find that the SFR– M * correlation is consistent with being linear down to M * ∼ 10 6 M ⊙ at z > 4. The evolution of the correlation is well described by , where t univ is the age of the universe in Gyr.