Resurrection of Traditional Luminosity Evolution Models to Explain Faint Field Galaxies

Abstract

We explore the nature of the evolution of faint field galaxies by assuming that the local luminosity function is not well defined. We use a non-negative least squares technique to derive a near optimal set of local luminosity functions for different spectral types of galaxies by fitting to the observed optical and near-infrared counts, B-R colors, and redshift distributions for galaxies with 15 < B < 27. We report here the results of using only traditional luminosity evolution (ie. the photometric evolution of stars in a galaxy over time given reasonable assumptions of the form of the star formation history for various galaxy types), and simple galaxy reddening and find excellent fits to the observed data to B = 27. We conclude that models more exotic than traditional luminosity evolution are not yet required to explain existing faint field galaxy data and thus the need for contributions by mergers or new populations of galaxies is at least 5x less than previously estimated.

9 pages + 1 table + 4 figures; uuencoded tar compressed postscript; to be published in The Astrohysical Journal Letters

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