The population of early-type galaxies: how it evolves with time and how it differs from passive and late-type galaxies

Aims. There are two aims to our analysis. On the one hand we are interested in addressing whether a sample of morphologically selected early-type galaxies (ETGs) differs from a sample of passive galaxies in terms of galaxy statistics. On the other hand we study how the relative abundance of galaxies, the number density, and, the stellar mass density for different morphological types change over the redshift range 0.6 <= z <= 2.5. Methods. From the 1302 galaxies brighter than Ks(AB) = 22 selected from the GOODS-MUSIC catalogue, we classified the ETGs, i.e. elliptical (E) and spheroidal galaxies (E/S0), on the basis of their morphology and the passive galaxies on the basis of their specific star formation rate (sSFR <= 10(-11) yr(-1)). Since the definition of a passive galaxy depends on the model parameters assumed to fit the spectral energy distribution of the galaxy, in addition to the assumed sSFR threshold, we probed the dependence of this definition and selection on the stellar initial mass function (IMF). Results. We find that spheroidal galaxies cannot be distinguished from the other morphological classes on the basis of their low star formation rate, irrespective of the IMF adopted in the models. In particular, we find that a large fraction of passive galaxies (>30%) are disc-shaped objects and that the passive selection misses a significant fraction (similar to 26%) of morphologically classified ETGs. Using the sample of 1302 galaxies morphologically classified into spheroidal galaxies (ETGs) and non-spheroidal galaxies (LTGs), we find that the fraction of these two morphological classes is constant over the redshift range 0.6 <= z <= 2.5, being 20-30% the fraction of ETGs and 70-80% the fraction of LTGs. However, at z < 1 these fractions change among the population of the most massive (M-* >= 10(11)M(circle dot)) galaxies, with the fraction of massive ETGs rising up to 40% and the fraction of massive LTGs decreasing to 60%. Parallel to this trend, we find that the number density and the stellar mass density of the whole population of massive galaxies increase by almost a factor of similar to 10 between 0.6 <= z <= 2.5, with a faster increase of these densities for the ETGs than for the LTGs. Finally, we find that the number density of the highest-mass galaxies both ETGs and LTGs (M-* > 3-4 x 10(11) M-circle dot) does not increase from z similar to 2.5, contrary to the lower mass galaxies. This suggests that the most massive galaxies formed at z > 2.5-3 and that the assembly of such high-mass galaxies is not effective at lower redshift.