MOIRCS Deep Survey V: A Universal Relation for Stellar Mass and Surface Brightness of Galaxies

Abstract

We present a universal linear correlation between the stellar mass and surface brightness (SB) of galaxies at 0.3<z<3, using a deep K-band selected catalog in the GOODS-North region. The correlation has a nearly constant slope, independent of redshift and color of galaxies in the rest-z frame. Considering unresolved compact galaxies, the tight correlation gives a lower boundary of SB for a given stellar mass; lower SB galaxies are prohibited over the boundary. The universal slope suggests that the stellar mass in galaxies was build up over their cosmic histories in a similar manner irrelevant to galaxy mass, as oppose to the scenario that massive galaxies mainly accumulated their stellar mass by major merging. In contrast, SB shows a strong dependence on redshift for a given stellar mass. It evolves as (1+z)^(-2.0~-0.8), in addition to dimming as (1+z)^4 by the cosmological expansion effect. The brightening depends on galaxy color and stellar mass. The blue population (rest-frame U-V<0), which is dominated by young and star-forming galaxies, evolves as ~(1+z)^(-0.8 +-0.3) in the rest-V band. On the other hand, the red population (U-V>0) and the massive galaxies (M_*>10^(10)M_sun) shows stronger brightening, (1+z)^(-1.5+-0.1). Based on the comparison with galaxy evolution models, we find that the phenomena are well explained by the pure luminosity evolution of galaxies out to z~3.

10 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (5)

• MOIRCS Deep Survey IV: Evolution of Galaxy Stellar Mass Function Back to z ~ 3
• Dry mergers and the formation of early-type galaxies: constraints from lensing and dynamics
• The size-star formation relation of massive galaxies at 1.5<z<2.5
• How Massive are Massive Compact Galaxies?
• Adaptive Optics Rest-Frame V-band Imaging of Lyman Break Galaxies at z~3: High-surface Density Disk-like Galaxies ?

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The evolution of galaxy size and morphology at z~0.5-3.0 in the GOODS-N region with HST/WFC3 data
• MOIRCS Deep Survey. IX. Deep Near-Infrared Imaging Data and Source Catalog
• A universal stellar-mass and size relation of galaxies in GOODS-N region
• Extremely Low Molecular Gas Content in the Vicinity of a Red Nugget Galaxy at $z=1.91$
• COSMOS-Web: Galaxy Size and Surface Brightness Evolution at Rest-Frame 1.22 $\mu$m Since $z=3$