1. Star formation in a stellar mass-selected sample of galaxies to z=3 from the GOODS-NICMOS Survey
- Author
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Bauer, A. E., Conselice, C. J., Pérez González, Pablo Guillermo, Gruetzbauch, R., Bluck, A. F. L., Buitrago, F., Mortlock, A., Bauer, A. E., Conselice, C. J., Pérez González, Pablo Guillermo, Gruetzbauch, R., Bluck, A. F. L., Buitrago, F., and Mortlock, A.
- Abstract
© 2011 The Authors. © 2011 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. © 2011 RAS. We acknowledge support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Nottingham. PGP-G acknowledges support from the Spanish Programa Nacional de Astronomía y Astrofísica under grants AYA2009 D07723 DE, AYA 2009-10368 and CSD2006-00070, and the Ramón y Cajal Program financed by the Spanish Government and the European Union., We present a study of the star-forming properties of a stellar mass-selected sample of galaxies in the GOODS (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey) NICMOS Survey (GNS), based on deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging of the GOODS North and South fields. Using a stellar mass-selected sample, combined with HST/ACS and Spitzer data to measure both ultraviolet (UV) and infrared-derived star formation rates (SFRs), we investigate the star forming properties of a complete sample of ∼1300 galaxies down to log M_*= 9.5 at redshifts 1.5 < z < 3. Eight per cent of the sample is made up of massive galaxies with M_*≥ 10^11 M_⊙. We derive optical colours, dust extinctions and UV and infrared SFR to determine how the SFR changes as a function of both stellar mass and time. Our results show that SFR increases at higher stellar mass such that massive galaxies nearly double their stellar mass from star formation alone over the redshift range studied, but the average value of SFR for a given stellar mass remains constant over this ∼2 Gyr period. Furthermore, we find no strong evolution in the SFR for our sample as a function of mass over our redshift range of interest; in particular we do not find a decline in the SFR among massive galaxies, as is seen at z < 1. The most massive galaxies in our sample (log M_*≥ 11) have high average SFRs with values SFR_UV, corr= 103 ± 75 M_⊙ yr^−1, and yet exhibit red rest-frame (U−B) colours at all redshifts. We conclude that the majority of these red high-redshift massive galaxies are red due to dust extinction. We find that A_2800 increases with stellar mass, and show that between 45 and 85 per cent of massive galaxies harbour dusty star formation. These results show that even just a few Gyr after the first galaxies appear, there are strong relations between the global physical properties of galaxies, driven by stellar mass or another underlying feature of galaxies strongly related to the stellar mass., Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), Unión Europea (UE), Leverhulme Trust, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), Reino Unido, University of Nottingham, Programa Nacional de Astronomía y Astrofísica (PNAyA), España, Ayudas para contratos Ramón y Cajal (RYC), MINECO, Gobierno de España, Depto. de Física de la Tierra y Astrofísica, Fac. de Ciencias Físicas, TRUE, pub
- Published
- 2023