A selection of Hα emitters at z = 2.1-2.5 using the Ks-band photometry of ZFOURGE

Abstract

Large and less-biased samples of star-forming galaxies are essential to investigate galaxy evolution. H$\alpha$ emission line is one of the most reliable tracers of star-forming galaxies because its strength is directly related to recent star formation. However, it is observationally expensive to construct large samples of H$\alpha$ emitters by spectroscopic or narrow-band imaging survey at high-redshifts. In this work, we demonstrate a method to extract H$\alpha$ fluxes of galaxies at $z=2.1$-$2.5$ from $K_s$ broad-band photometry of ZFOURGE catalog. Combined with 25-39 other filters, we estimate the emission line fluxes by SED fitting with stellar population models that incorporate emission-line strengths. 2005 galaxies are selected as H$\alpha$ emitters by our method and their fluxes show good agreement with previous measurements in the literature. On the other hand, there are more H$\alpha$ luminous galaxies than previously reported. The discrepancy can be explained by extended H$\alpha$ profiles of massive galaxies and a luminosity dependence of dust attenuation, which are not taken into account in the previous work. We also find that there are a large number of low-mass galaxies with much higher specific star formation rate (sSFR) than expected from the extrapolated star formation main sequence. Such low-mass galaxies exhibit larger ratios between H$\alpha$ and UV fluxes compared to more massive high sSFR galaxies. This result implies that a ``starburst'' mode may differ among galaxies: low-mass galaxies appear to assemble their stellar mass via short-duration bursts while more massive galaxies tend to experience longer-duration ($>10\mathrm{Myr}$) bursts.

arXiv comment18 pages, 19 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ

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