The Velocity Dispersion Function for Massive Quiescent and Star-Forming Galaxies at 0.6 $<$ z $\le$ 1.0

Abstract

We present the first direct spectroscopic measurement of the stellar velocity dispersion function (VDF) for massive quiescent and star-forming galaxies at $0.6<z\le 1.0$. For this analysis we use individual measurements of stellar velocity dispersion from high-S/N spectra from the public Large Early Galaxy Astrophysics Census (LEGA-C) survey. We report a remarkable stability of the VDF for both quiescent and star-forming galaxies within this redshift range, though we note the presence of weak evolution in the number densities of star-forming galaxies. We compare both VDFs with previous direct and inferred measurements at local and intermediate redshifts, with the caveat that previous measurements of the VDF for star-forming galaxies are poorly constrained at all epochs. We emphasize that this work is the first to directly push to low-stellar velocity dispersion (${\sigma }_{\star }>100$ km s${}^{-1}$) and extend to star-forming galaxies. We are largely consistent with the high-sigma tail measured from BOSS, and we find that the VDF remains constant from the median redshift of LEGA-C, $z\sim 0.8$, to the present day.

11 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

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