Probing star formation in galaxies at $z\approx 1$ via a Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope stacking analysis

Abstract

We have used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) to carry out deep 610 MHz continuum imaging of four sub-fields of the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey. We stacked the radio emission in the GMRT images from a near-complete (absolute blue magnitude ${\mathrm{M}}_{\mathrm{B}}\le -21$) sample of 3698 blue star-forming galaxies with redshifts $0.7\lesssim z\lesssim 1.45$ to detect (at $\approx 17\sigma$ significance) the median rest-frame 1.4 GHz radio continuum emission of the sample galaxies. The stacked emission is unresolved, with a rest-frame 1.4 GHz luminosity of ${\mathrm{L}}_{1.4\mathrm{GHz}}=(4.13\pm 0.24)\times 10^{22}$ W Hz${}^{-1}$. We used the local relation between total star formation rate (SFR) and 1.4 GHz luminosity to infer a median total SFR of $(24.4\pm 1.4){\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$ yr${}^{-1}$ for blue star-forming galaxies with ${\mathrm{M}}_{\mathrm{B}}\le -21$ at $0.7\lesssim z\lesssim 1.45$. We detect the main-sequence relation between SFR and stellar mass, ${\mathrm{M}}_{\star }$, obtaining $\mathrm{SFR}=(13.4\pm 1.8)\times [({\mathrm{M}}_{\star }/(10^{10}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }){]}^{0.73\pm 0.09}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }\mathrm{y}{\mathrm{r}}^{-1}$; the power-law index shows no change over $z\approx 0.7-1.45$. We find that the nebular line emission suffers less extinction than the stellar continuum, contrary to the situation in the local Universe; the ratio of nebular extinction to stellar extinction increases with decreasing redshift. We obtain an upper limit of 0.87 Gyr to the atomic gas depletion time of a sub-sample of the DEEP2 galaxies at $z\approx 1.3$; neutral atomic gas thus appears to be a transient phase in high-$z$ star-forming galaxies.

16 pages, 7 figures; accepted for publication in ApJ. Minor changes to match version accepted for publication

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• Radio continuum emission from local analogs of high-z faint LAEs: Blueberry galaxies
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