paper

MOIRCS Deep Survey. VIII. Evolution of Star Formation Activity as a Function of Stellar Mass in Galaxies since z~3

arXiv:1009.0002 · doi:10.1088/0004-637X/723/1/129

Abstract

We study the evolution of star formation activity of galaxies at 0.5<z<3.5 as a function of stellar mass, using very deep NIR data taken with Multi-Object Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (MOIRCS) on the Subaru telescope in the GOODS-North region. The NIR imaging data reach K ~ 23-24 Vega magnitude and they allow us to construct a nearly stellar mass-limited sample down to ~ 10^{9.5-10} Msun even at z~3. We estimated star formation rates (SFRs) of the sample with two indicators, namely, the Spitzer/MIPS 24um flux and the rest-frame 2800A luminosity. The SFR distribution at a fixed Mstar shifts to higher values with increasing redshift at 0.5<z<3.5. More massive galaxies show stronger evolution of SFR at z>~1. We found galaxies at 2.5<z<3.5 show a bimodality in their SSFR distribution, which can be divided into two populations by a constant SSFR of ~2 Gyr^{-1}. Galaxies in the low-SSFR group have SSFRs of ~ 0.5-1.0 Gyr^{-1}, while the high-SSFR population shows ~10 Gyr^{-1}. The cosmic SFRD is dominated by galaxies with Mstar = 10^{10-11} Msun at 0.5<z<3.5, while the contribution of massive galaxies with Mstar = 10^{11-11.5} Msun shows a strong evolution at z>1 and becomes significant at z~3, especially in the case with the SFR based on MIPS 24um. In galaxies with Mstar = 10^{10-11.5} Msun, those with a relatively narrow range of SSFR (<~1 dex) dominates the cosmic SFRD at 0.5<z<3.5. The SSFR of galaxies which dominate the SFRD systematically increases with redshift. At 2.5<z<3.5, the high-SSFR population, which is relatively small in number, dominates the SFRD. Major star formation in the universe at higher redshift seems to be associated with a more rapid growth of stellar mass of galaxies.

16 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (25)

MOIRCS Deep Survey. VIII. Evolution of Star Formation Activity as a Function of Stellar Mass in Galaxies since z~3 · wovepaper