We study the evolution of the scaling relations that compare the effective density ( ) and core density ( kpc) to the stellar masses of star-forming galaxies (SFGs) and quiescent galaxies. These ...relations have been fully in place since and have exhibited almost constant slope and scatter since that time. For SFGs, the zero points in and decline by only . This fact plus the narrowness of the relations suggests that galaxies could evolve roughly along the scaling relations. Quiescent galaxies follow different scaling relations that are offset to higher densities at the same mass and redshift. Furthermore, the zero point of their core density has declined by only since , while the zero point of the effective density declines by . When galaxies quench, they move from the star-forming relations to the quiescent relations. This involves an increase in the core and effective densities, which suggests that SFGs could experience a phase of significant core growth relative to the average evolution along the structural relations. The distribution of massive galaxies relative to the SFR-M and the quiescent relations exhibits an L-shape that is independent of redshift. The knee of this relation consists of a subset of "compact" SFGs that are the most likely precursors of quiescent galaxies forming at later times. The compactness selection threshold in exhibits a small variation from z = 3 to 0.5, M kpc−2, allowing the most efficient identification of compact SFGs and quiescent galaxies at every redshift.
We present analytical reconstructions of SN Ia delay time distributions (DTDs) by way of two independent methods: by a Markov Chain Monte Carlo best-fit technique comparing the volumetric SN Ia rate ...history to today's compendium cosmic star formation history, and second through a maximum likelihood analysis of the star formation rate histories of individual galaxies in the GOODS/CANDELS field, in comparison to their resultant SN Ia yields. We adopt a flexible skew-normal DTD model, which could match a wide range of physically motivated DTD forms. We find a family of solutions that are essentially exponential DTDs, similar in shape to the β −1 power-law DTDs, but with more delayed events (>1 Gyr in age) than prompt events (<1 Gyr). Comparing these solutions to delay time measures separately derived from field galaxies and galaxy clusters, we find the skew-normal solutions can accommodate both without requiring a different DTD form in different environments. These model fits are generally inconsistent with results from single-degenerate binary population synthesis models, and are seemingly supportive of double-degenerate progenitors for most SN Ia events.
We present a systematic study of the shape of the dust attenuation curve in star-forming galaxies from the far-ultraviolet (far-UV) to the near-infrared (NIR; ∼0.15-2 μ m), as a function of specific ...star formation rate (ψS) and axial ratio (b/a), for galaxies with and without a significant bulge. Our sample comprises 23 000 (15 000) galaxies with a median redshift of 0.07, with photometric entries in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey-Large Area Survey and Galaxy Evolution Explorer-All-Sky Imaging Survey catalogues and emission-line measurements from the SDSS spectroscopic survey. We develop a new pair-matching technique to isolate the dust attenuation curves from the stellar continuum emission. The main results are: (i) the slope of the attenuation curve in the optical varies weakly with ψS, strongly with b/a, and is significantly steeper than the Milky Way extinction law in bulge-dominated galaxies; (ii) the NIR slope is constant and matches the slope of the Milky Way extinction law; (iii) the UV has a slope change consistent with a dust bump at 2175 Å which is evident in all samples and varies strongly in strength with b/a in the bulge-dominated sample; (iv) there is a strong increase in emission-line-to-continuum dust attenuation (τ
V, line/τ
V, cont) with both decreasing ψS and increasing b/a; and (v) radial gradients in dust attenuation increase strongly with increasing ψS, and the presence of a bulge does not alter the strength of the gradients. These results are consistent with the picture in which young stars are surrounded by dense 'birth clouds' with low covering factor which disperse on time-scales of ∼107 yr and the diffuse interstellar dust is distributed in a centrally concentrated disc with a smaller scaleheight than the older stars that contribute the majority of the red and NIR light. Within this model, the path-length of diffuse dust, but not of birth-cloud dust, increases with increasing inclination and the apparent optical attenuation curve is steepened by the differential effect of larger dust opacity towards younger stars than towards older stars. Additionally, our findings suggest that: (i) galaxies with higher star formation rates per unit stellar mass have a higher fraction of diffuse dust, which is more centrally concentrated; (ii) the observed strength of the 2175-Å dust feature is affected predominantly by global geometry; and (iii) only highly inclined discs are optically thick. We provide new empirically derived attenuation curves for correcting the light from star-forming galaxies for dust attenuation.
The origin of dust in galaxies across cosmic time Triani, Dian P; Sinha, Manodeep; Croton, Darren J ...
Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
04/2020, Volume:
493, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
ABSTRACT
We study the dust evolution in galaxies by implementing a detailed dust prescription in the SAGE semi-analytical model (SAM) for galaxy formation. The new model, called Dusty SAGE, follows ...the condensation of dust in the ejecta of Type II supernovae and asymptotic giant branch stars, grain growth in the dense molecular clouds, destruction by supernovae shocks, and the removal of dust from the interstellar medium (ISM) by star formation, reheating, inflows, and outflows. Our model successfully reproduces the observed dust mass function at redshift z = 0 and the observed scaling relations for dust across a wide range of redshifts. We find that the dust mass content in the present Universe is mainly produced via grain growth in the ISM. By contrast, in the early Universe, the primary production mechanism for dust is the condensation in stellar ejecta. The shift of the significant production channel for dust characterizes the scaling relations of dust-to-gas (DTG) and dust-to-metal (DTM) ratios. In galaxies where the grain growth dominates, we find positive correlations for DTG and DTM ratios with both metallicity and stellar mass. On the other hand, in galaxies where dust is produced primarily via condensation, we find negative or no correlation for DTM and DTG ratios with either metallicity or stellar mass. In agreement with observation showing that the circumgalactic medium contains more dust than the ISM, our model also shows the same trend for z < 4. Our SAM is publicly available at https://github.com/dptriani/dusty-sage.
We present a new approach to constrain galaxy physical parameters from the combined interpretation of stellar and nebular emission in wide ranges of observations. This approach relies on the Bayesian ...analysis of any type of galaxy spectral energy distribution using a comprehensive library of synthetic spectra assembled using state-of-the-art models of star formation and chemical enrichment histories, stellar population synthesis, nebular emission and attenuation by dust. We focus on the constraints set by five-band ugriz photometry and low- and medium-resolution spectroscopy at rest wavelengths λ= 3600-7400 Å on a few physical parameters of galaxies: the observer-frame absolute r-band stellar mass-to-light ratio, M
*/L
r
; the fraction of a current galaxy stellar mass formed during the last 2.5 Gyr, f
SFH; the specific star formation rate, ψS; the gas-phase oxygen abundance, 12 + log(O/H); the total effective V-band absorption optical depth of the dust,
; and the fraction of this arising from dust in the ambient interstellar medium, μ. Since these parameters cannot be known a priori for any galaxy sample, we assess the accuracy to which they can be retrieved from observations by simulating 'pseudo-observations' using models with known parameters. Assuming that these models are good approximations of true galaxies, we find that the combined analysis of stellar and nebular emission in low-resolution 50 Å full width at half-maximum (FWHM) galaxy spectra provides valuable constraints on all physical parameters. The typical uncertainties in high-quality spectra are about 0.13 dex for M
*/L
r
, 0.23 for f
SFH, 0.24 dex for ψS, 0.28 for 12 + log(O/H), 0.64 for
and 0.16 for μ. The uncertainties in 12 + log(O/H) and
tighten by about 20 per cent for galaxies with detectable emission lines and by another 45 per cent when the spectral resolution is increased to 5 Å FWHM. At this spectral resolution, the analysis of the combined stellar and nebular emission in the high-quality spectra of 12 660 Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) star-forming galaxies using our approach yields likelihood distributions of M
★, 12 + log(O/H),
and ψS similar to those obtained in previous separate analyses of the stellar and nebular emission at the original (twice higher) SDSS spectral resolution. Meanwhile, rest-frame ugriz photometry provides competitive constraints on M
*/L
r
. We show that the constraints derived on galaxy physical parameters from these different types of observations depend sensitively on signal-to-noise ratio. Our approach can be extended to the analysis of any type of observation across the wavelength range covered by spectral evolution models.
ABSTRACT Constraining the star formation histories (SFHs) of individual galaxies is crucial for understanding the mechanisms that regulate their evolution. Here, we combine multi-wavelength ...(ultraviolet, optical, and infrared) measurements of a very large sample of galaxies (∼230,000) at z < 0.16, with physically motivated models of galaxy spectral energy distributions to extract constraints on galaxy physical parameters (such as stellar mass and star formation rate) as well as individual SFHs. In particular, we set constraints on the timescales in which galaxies form a certain percentage of their total stellar mass (namely, 10%, 50%, and 90%). The large statistics allows us to average such measurements over different populations of galaxies (quiescent and star-forming) and in narrow ranges of stellar mass. As in the downsizing scenario, we confirm that low-mass galaxies have more extended SFHs than high-mass galaxies. We also find that at the same observed stellar mass, galaxies that are now quiescent evolve more rapidly than galaxies that are currently still forming stars. This suggests that stellar mass is not the only driver of galaxy evolution, but plays along with other factors such as merger events and other environmental effects.
The 3D-HST and CANDELS programs have provided WFC3 and ACS spectroscopy and photometry over approximate900 arcmin super(2) in five fields: AEGIS, COSMOS, GOODS-North, GOODS-South, and the UKIDSS UDS ...field. All these fields have a wealth of publicly available imaging data sets in addition to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data, which makes it possible to construct the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of objects over a wide wavelength range. In this paper we describe a photometric analysis of the CANDELS and 3D-HST HST imaging and the ancillary imaging data at wavelengths 0.3-8Mum. Objects were selected in the WFC3 near-IR bands, and their SEDs were determined by carefully taking the effects of the point-spread function in each observation into account. A total of 147 distinct imaging data sets were used in the analysis. The photometry is made available in the form of six catalogs: one for each field, as well as a master catalog containing all objects in the entire survey. We also provide derived data products: photometric redshifts, determined with the EAZY code, and stellar population parameters determined with the FAST code. We make all the imaging data that were used in the analysis available, including our reductions of the WFC3 imaging in all five fields. 3D-HST is a spectroscopic survey with the WFC3 and ACS grisms, and the photometric catalogs presented here constitute a necessary first step in the analysis of these grism data. All the data presented in this paper are available through the 3D-HST Web site (http://3dhst.research.yale.edu).
z ∼ 2: An Epoch of Disk Assembly Simons, Raymond C.; Kassin, Susan A.; Weiner, Benjamin J. ...
The Astrophysical journal,
07/2017, Volume:
843, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We explore the evolution of the internal gas kinematics of star-forming galaxies from the peak of cosmic star formation at z ∼ 2 to today. Measurements of galaxy rotation velocity Vrot, which ...quantify ordered motions, and gas velocity dispersion g , which quantify disordered motions, are adopted from the DEEP2 and SIGMA surveys. This sample covers a continuous baseline in redshift over 0.1 < z < 2.5 , spanning 10 Gyr. At low redshift, nearly all sufficiently massive star-forming galaxies are rotationally supported ( V rot > g ). By z = 2, 50% and 70% of galaxies are rotationally supported at low ( 10 9 - 10 10 M ) and high ( 10 10 - 10 11 M ) stellar mass, respectively. For V rot > 3 g , the percentage drops below 35% for all masses. From z = 2 to now, galaxies exhibit remarkably smooth kinematic evolution on average. All galaxies tend toward rotational support with time, and higher-mass systems reach it earlier. This is largely due to a mass-independent decline in g by a factor of 3 since z = 2. Over the same time period, Vrot increases by a factor of 1.5 in low-mass systems but does not evolve at high mass. These trends in Vrot and g are at a fixed stellar mass and therefore should not be interpreted as evolutionary tracks for galaxy populations. When populations are linked in time via abundance matching, g declines as before and Vrot strongly increases with time for all galaxy populations, enhancing the evolution in V rot g . These results indicate that z = 2 is a period of disk assembly, during which strong rotational support is only just beginning to emerge.
The majority of massive star-forming galaxies at z ∼ 2 have velocity gradients suggestive of rotation, in addition to large amounts of disordered motions. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is ...challenging to distinguish the regular rotation of a disk galaxy from the orbital motions of merging galaxies with seeing-limited data. However, the merger fractions at z ∼ 2 are likely too low for this to have a large effect on measurements of disk fractions. To determine how often mergers pass for disks, we look to galaxy formation simulations. We analyze ∼24,000 synthetic images and kinematic maps of 31 high-resolution simulations of isolated galaxies and mergers at z ∼ 2. We determine if the synthetic observations pass the criteria commonly used to identify disk galaxies and whether the results are consistent with their intrinsic dynamical states. Galaxies that are intrinsically mergers pass the disk criteria for anywhere from 0% to 100% of sightlines. The exact percentage depends strongly on the specific disk criteria adopted and weakly on the separation of the merging galaxies. Therefore, one cannot tell with certainty whether observations of an individual galaxy indicate a merger or a disk. To estimate the fraction of mergers passing as disks in current kinematics samples, we combine the probability that a merger will pass as a disk with theoretical merger fractions from a cosmological simulation. Taking the latter at face value, the observed disk fractions are overestimated by small amounts: at most by 5% at high stellar mass (1010-11 M ) and 15% at low stellar mass (109-10 M ).
We present a robust method, weighted von Mises kernel density estimation, along with boundary correction to reconstruct the underlying number density field of galaxies. We apply this method to ...galaxies brighter than Hubble Space Telescope AB mag in the redshift range 0.4 ≤ z ≤ 5 in the five CANDELS fields (GOODS-N, GOODS-S, EGS, UDS, and COSMOS). We then use these measurements to explore the environmental dependence of the star formation activity of galaxies. We find strong evidence of environmental quenching for massive galaxies (M 1011 M ) out to z ∼ 3.5 such that an overdense environment hosts 20% more massive quiescent galaxies than an underdense region. We also find that environmental quenching efficiency grows with stellar mass and reaches ∼60% for massive galaxies at z ∼ 0.5. The environmental quenching is also more efficient than stellar mass quenching for low-mass galaxies (M 1010 M ) at low and intermediate redshifts (z 1.2). Our findings concur thoroughly with the "overconsumption" quenching model where the termination of cool gas accretion (cosmological starvation) happens in an overdense environment and the galaxy starts to consume its remaining gas reservoir in depletion time. The depletion time depends on the stellar mass and could explain the evolution of environmental quenching efficiency with stellar mass.
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