Exploring the Luminosity Evolution and Stellar Mass Assembly of 2SLAQ Luminous Red Galaxies Between Redshift 0.4 and 0.8

Abstract

We present an analysis of the evolution of 8625 Luminous Red Galaxies between z = 0.4 and z = 0.8 in the 2dF and SDSS LRG and QSO (2SLAQ) survey. The LRGs are split into redshift bins and the evolution of both the luminosity and stellar mass function with redshift is considered and compared to the assumptions of a passive evolution scenario. We draw attention to several sources of systematic error that could bias the evolutionary predictions made in this paper. While the inferred evolution is found to be relatively unaffected by the exact choice of spectral evolution model used to compute K+e corrections, we conclude that photometric errors could be a source of significant bias in colour-selected samples such as this, in particular when using parametric maximum likelihood based estimators. We find that the evolution of the most massive LRGs is consistent with the assumptions of passive evolution and that the stellar mass assembly of the LRGs is largely complete by z ~ 0.8. Our findings suggest that massive galaxies with stellar masses above 10^11 solar masses must have undergone merging and star formation processes at a very early stage (z > 1). This supports the emerging picture of downsizing in both the star formation as well as the mass assembly of early type galaxies. Given that our spectroscopic sample covers an unprecedentedly large volume and probes the most massive end of the galaxy mass function, we find that these observational results present a significant challenge for many current models of galaxy formation

17 pages, 15 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS, Some changes to match accepted version

References in corpus (18)

• Cold streams in early massive hot haloes as the main mode of galaxy formation
• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Likelihoods and Parameters from the WMAP data
• The Galaxy Mass Function up to z=4 in the GOODS-MUSIC sample: into the epoch of formation of massive galaxies
• Ages and metallicities of early-type galaxies in the SDSS: new insight into the physical origin of the colour-magnitude and the Mg2-sigmaV relations
• The Gemini Deep Deep Survey: III. The abundance of massive galaxies 3-6 billion years after the Big Bang
• The stellar masses of 25000 galaxies at 0.2<z<1.0 estimated by the COMBO-17 survey
• Modeling the color evolution of luminous red galaxies - improvements with empirical stellar spectra
• The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO (2SLAQ) Luminous Red Galaxy Survey
• Cosmological baryonic and matter densities from 600,000 SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies with photometric redshifts
• The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO survey: Evolution of the Luminosity Function of Luminous Red Galaxies to z=0.6
• The redshift evolution of early-type galaxies in COSMOS: Do massive early-type galaxies form by dry mergers?
• Clustering of luminous red galaxies I: large scale redshift space distortions
• The Properties and Evolution of a K-band Selected Sample of Massive Galaxies at z~0.4 - 2 in the Palomar/DEEP2 Survey
• MegaZ-LRG: A photometric redshift catalogue of one million SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies
• Luminosity Function Constraints on the Evolution of Massive Red Galaxies Since z~0.9
• Unveiling dark halos in lensing galaxies
• The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO Survey: The Star Formation Histories of Luminous Red Galaxies
• Luminosity and surface brightness distribution of K-band galaxies from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Constraints on intrinsic alignment contamination of weak lensing surveys using the MegaZ-LRG sample
• Dissecting the size evolution of elliptical galaxies since z~1: puffing up vs minor merging scenarios
• The Assembly Histories of Quiescent Galaxies Since z=0.7 from Absorption Line Spectroscopy
• How is Star Formation Quenched in Massive Galaxies?
• Halo model and halo properties in Galileon gravity cosmologies
• Observational constraints on the spin of the most massive black holes from radio observations
• Luminous Starbursts in the Redshift Desert at z~1-2: Star Formation Rates, Masses & Evidence for Outflows
• The MgII Cross-section of Luminous Red Galaxies
• The Red Dead Redemption Survey of Circumgalactic Gas About Massive Galaxies. I. Mass and Metallicity of the Cool Phase
• Evolution of the luminosity-to-halo mass relation of LRGs from a combined SDSS-DR10+RCS2 analysis
• The road to the red sequence: A detailed view of the formation of a massive galaxy at z~2
• [OII] emitters in the GOODS field at z~1.85: a homogeneous measure of evolving star formation
• Halo-model analysis of the clustering of photometric luminous red galaxies at $0.10\le z\le 1.05$ from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey
• The Stellar Masses of ~40,000 UV Selected Galaxies from the WiggleZ Survey at 0.3<z<1.0: Analogues of Lyman Break Galaxies?
• Evidence for cosmic evolution in the spin of the most massive black holes
• The Evolution of Early-type Galaxies Selected by Their Spatial Clustering
• Detecting Massive Galaxies at High Redshift using the Dark Energy Survey
• The satellite population around luminous red galaxies in the 25 square degree DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys Early Data Release