Uncovering Drivers of Disk Assembly: Bulgeless Galaxies and the Stellar Mass Tully-Fisher Relation

In order to determine what processes govern the assembly history of galaxies with rotating disks, we examine the stellar mass Tully-Fisher relation over a wide range in redshift partitioned according to whether or not galaxies contain a prominent bulge. Using our earlier Keck spectroscopic sample, for which bulge/total parameters are available from analyses of HST images, we find that bulgeless disk galaxies with z > 0.8 present a significant offset from the local Tully-Fisher relation whereas, at all redshifts probed, those with significant bulges fall along the local relation. Our results support the suggestion that bulge growth may somehow expedite the maturing of disk galaxies onto the Tully-Fisher relation. We discuss a variety of physical hypotheses that may explain this result in the context of kinematic observations of star-forming galaxies at redshifts z = 0 and z > 2.
5 pages, 2 figures, submitted to ApJ