The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Project III: A Lack of Growth Among Massive Galaxies

Abstract

The average stellar mass (Mstar) of high-mass galaxies (Mstar > 3e11 Msun) is expected to grow by ~30% since z~1, largely through ongoing mergers that are also invoked to explain the observed increase in galaxy sizes. Direct evidence for the corresponding growth in stellar mass has been elusive, however, in part because the volumes sampled by previous redshift surveys have been too small to yield reliable statistics. In this work, we make use of the Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Catalog to build a mass-limited sample of 41,770 galaxies (Mstar > 1.6e11) with optical to near-IR photometry and a large fraction (>55%) of spectroscopic redshifts. Our sample spans 139 square degrees, significantly larger than most previous efforts. After accounting for a number of potential systematic errors, including the effects of Mstar scatter, we measure galaxy stellar mass functions over 0.3 < z < 0.65 and detect no growth in the typical Mstar of massive galaxies with an uncertainty of 9%. This confidence level is dominated by uncertainties in the star formation history assumed for Mstar estimates, although our inability to characterize low surface-brightness outskirts may be the most important limitation of our study. Even among these high-mass galaxies, we find evidence for differential evolution when splitting the sample by recent star formation (SF) activity. While low-SF systems appear to become completely passive, we find a mostly sub-dominant population of galaxies with residual, but low rates of star formation (~1 Msun/yr) number density does not evolve. Interestingly, these galaxies become more prominent at higher Mstar, representing ~10% of all galaxies at Mstar ~ 1e12 Msun and perhaps dominating at even larger masses.

Accepted in ApJ

References in corpus (21)

• The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS)
• Mass and environment as drivers of galaxy evolution in SDSS and zCOSMOS and the origin of the Schechter function
• The propagation of uncertainties in stellar population synthesis modeling I: The relevance of uncertain aspects of stellar evolution and the IMF to the derived physical properties of galaxies
• K-corrections and filter transformations in the ultraviolet, optical, and near infrared
• UV Star Formation Rates in the Local Universe
• The hierarchical formation of the brightest cluster galaxies
• 3D-HST+CANDELS: The Evolution of the Galaxy Size-Mass Distribution since $z=3$
• PRIMUS: Constraints on Star Formation Quenching and Galaxy Merging, and the Evolution of the Stellar Mass Function From z=0-1
• The stellar masses of 25000 galaxies at 0.2<z<1.0 estimated by the COMBO-17 survey
• Recovering galaxy star formation and metallicity histories from spectra using VESPA
• On the galaxy stellar mass function, the mass-metallicity relation, and the implied baryonic mass function
• A chronicle of galaxy mass assembly in the EAGLE simulation
• The 2dF-SDSS LRG and QSO survey: Evolution of the Luminosity Function of Luminous Red Galaxies to z=0.6
• The Assembly Histories of Quiescent Galaxies Since z=0.7 from Absorption Line Spectroscopy
• The Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey. III. The Three-Component Structure of Nearby Elliptical Galaxies
• A consistent measure of the merger histories of massive galaxies using close-pair statistics I: Major mergers at $z<3.5$
• Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Refining the Local Galaxy Merger Rate using Morphological Information
• Minor vs Major Mergers: The Stellar Mass Growth of Massive Galaxies from z=3 using Number Density Selection Techniques
• Building a Predictive Model of Galaxy Formation - I: Phenomenological Model Constrained to the $z=0$ Stellar Mass Function
• Mock observations with the Millennium simulation: Cosmological downsizing and intermediate redshift observations
• Environmental dependence of the galaxy stellar mass function in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification Data

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Target Selection and Validation of DESI Luminous Red Galaxies
• Photometric Redshifts for Next-Generation Surveys
• Measurement of Parity-Odd Modes in the Large-Scale 4-Point Correlation Function of SDSS BOSS DR12 CMASS and LOWZ Galaxies
• Horizon-AGN virtual observatory - 1. SED-fitting performance and forecasts for future imaging surveys
• Evolution of the Stellar Mass Function and Infrared Luminosity Function of Galaxies since $z=1.2$
• Gravitational orbits in the expanding universe revisited
• On the weak lensing masses of a new sample of galaxy groups
• Tightening weak lensing constraints on the ellipticity of galaxy-scale dark matter haloes
• Inferring Mbh-Mbulge Evolution from the Gravitational Wave Background
• On the spatial distribution of the Large-Scale structure: An Unsupervised search for Parity Violation
• Growing in number, passive in nature: tracing the evolution of the most massive quiescent galaxies since z ~ 0.8 with BOSS and DESI
• Strong Conformity and Assembly Bias: Towards a Physical Understanding of the Galaxy-Halo Connection in SDSS Clusters
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Cannibalism Caught in the Act -- on the Frequency of Occurrence of Multiple Cores in Brightest Cluster Galaxies
• The $10\mathrm{kpc}$ collar of early-type galaxies -- probing evolution by focusing on the inner stellar density profile