Search

Extreme Emission Line Galaxies (EELGs) stand as remarkable objects due to their extremely metal poor environment and intense star formation. Considered as local analogues of high-redshift galaxies in the peak of their star-forming activity, they offer insights into conditions prevalent during the early Universe. Assessment of their stellar and gas properties is therefore of critical importance, which requires the assembly of a considerable sample, comprehending a broad redshift range. The Javalambre-Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (JPAS) plays a significant role in assembling such a sample, encompassing ∼8000  |$\rm deg^2$| and employing 54 narrow-band optical filters. The present work describes the development and subsequent application of the tools that will be employed in the forthcoming JPAS spectrophotometric data, allowing for the massive and automated characterization of EELGs that are expected to be identified. This fully automated pipeline (requiring only the object coordinates from users) constructs Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs) by retrieving virtually all the available multiwavelength photometric data archives, employs SED fitting tools, and identifies optical emission lines. It was applied to the sample of extreme line emitters identified in the miniJPAS Survey, and its derived physical properties such as stellar mass and age, coupled with fundamental relations, mirror results obtained through spectral modelling of SDSS spectra. Thorough testing using galaxies with documented photometric measurements across different wavelengths confirmed the pipeline's accuracy, demonstrating its capability for automated analysis of sources with varying characteristics, spanning brightness, morphology, and redshifts. The modular nature of this pipeline facilitates any addition from the user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a synthetic galaxy lightcone specially designed for narrow-band optical photometric surveys. To reduce time-discreteness effects, unlike previous works, we directly include the lightcone construction in the L-Galaxies semi-analytic model applied to the subhalo merger trees of the Millennium simulation. Additionally, we add a model for the nebular emission in star-forming regions, which is crucial for correctly predicting the narrow- and medium-band photometry of galaxies. Specifically, we consider, individually for each galaxy, the contribution of 9 different lines: Lyα (1216 Å), Hβ (4861 Å), Hα (6563 Å), [O II] (3727 Å, 3729 Å), [O III] (4959 Å, 5007 Å), [Ne III] (3870 Å), [O I] (6300 Å), [N II] (6548 Å, 6583 Å), and [S II] (6717 Å, 6731 Å). We validate our lightcone by comparing galaxy number counts, angular clustering, and Hα, Hβ, [O II], and [O III]5007 luminosity functions to a compilation of observations. As an application of our mock lightcones, we generated catalogues tailored for J-PLUS, a large optical galaxy survey featuring five broad-band and seven medium-band filters. We study the ability of the survey to correctly identify, with a simple three-filter method, a population of emission-line galaxies at various redshifts. We show that the 4000 Å break in the spectral energy distribution of galaxies can be misidentified as line emission. However, all significant excess (> 0.4 mag) can be correctly and unambiguously attributed to emission-line galaxies. Our catalogues are publicly released to facilitate their use in interpreting narrow-band surveys and in quantifying the impact of line emission in broad-band photometry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present star formation histories (SFHs) for a sample of 104 massive (stellar mass M > 1010 M⊙) quiescent galaxies (MQGs) at z = 1.0-1.5 from the analysis of spectrophotometric data from the Survey for High-z Absorption Red and Dead Sources (SHARDS) and HST/WFC3 G102 and G141 surveys of the GOODS-North field, jointly with broad-band observations from ultraviolet (UV) to far-infrared (far-IR). The sample is constructed on the basis of rest-frame UVJ colours and specific star formation rates (sSFRs = SFR/Mass). The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of each galaxy are compared to models assuming a delayed exponentially declining SFH. A Monte Carlo algorithm characterizes the degeneracies, which we are able to break taking advantage of the SHARDS data resolution, by measuring indices such as MgUV and D4000. The population of MQGs shows a duality in their properties. The sample is dominated (85 per cent) by galaxies with young mass-weighted ages, tM < 2 Gyr, short star formation time-scales, <τ> ~ 60-200 Myr, and masses log(M/M⊙) ~ 10.5. There is an older population (15 per cent) with tM = 2-4 Gyr, longer star formation time-scales, <τ> ~ 400 Myr, and larger masses, log(M/M⊙) ~ 10.7. The SFHs of our MQGs are consistent with the slope and the location of the main sequence of star-forming galaxies at z > 1.0, when our galaxies were 0.5-1.0 Gyr old. According to these SFHs, all the MQGs experienced a luminous infrared galaxy phase that lasts for ~500 Myr, and half of them an ultraluminous infrared galaxy phase for ~100 Myr. We find that the MQG population is almost assembled at z ~ 1, and continues evolving passively with few additions to the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]