2021/01/13 by Lucas Hunt, L. R. Hunt, D. J. Pisano +6
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy formation and evolution #Luminosity #Luminosity function #Physics #Redshift #Star formation #Universe #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abda4c
19 pages, 12 Figures, Accepted in ApJ
arxiv created 2021/01/13 · openalex publication_date 2021/03/01 · arxiv updated 2021/03/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract Luminous compact blue galaxies (LCBGs) are compact, star-forming galaxies that are rarely observed in the local universe but abundant at z = 1. This increase in LCBG number density over cosmic lookback time roughly follows the increase in the star formation rate density of the universe over the same period. We use publicly available data in the COSMOS field to study the evolution of the largest homogeneous sample of LCBGs to date by deriving their luminosity function in four redshift bins over the range 0.1 ≤ z ≤ 1. We find that over this redshift range, the characteristic luminosity ( M *) increases by ∼0.2 mag, and the number density increases by a factor of 4. While LCBGs make up only about 18% of galaxies more luminous than M B = −18.5 at z ∼ 0.2, they constitute roughly 54% at z ∼ 0.9. The strong evolution in number density indicates that LCBGs are an important population of galaxies to study in order to better understand the decrease in the star formation rate density of the universe since z ∼ 1.