An integrated picture of star formation, metallicity evolution, and galactic stellar mass assembly

We present an integrated study of star formation and galactic stellar mass assembly from z = 0.05 to 1.5 and galactic metallicity evolution from z = 0.05 to 0.9 using a very large and highly spectroscopically complete sample selected by rest-frame NIR bolometric flux in the GOODS-N. We assume a Salpeter IMF and fit Bruzual & Charlot models to compute the galactic stellar masses and extinctions. We determine the expected formed stellar mass density growth rates produced by star formation and compare them with the growth rates measured from the formed stellar mass functions by mass interval. We show that the growth rates match if the IMF is slightly increased fromthe Salpeter IMF at intermediate masses (similar to 10 M-circle dot). We investigate the evolution of galaxy color, spectral type, and morphology with mass and redshift and the evolution of mass with environment. We find that applying extinction corrections is critical when analyzing galaxy colors; e. g., nearly all of the galaxies in the green valley are 24 mu m sources, but after correcting for extinction, the bulk of the 24 mu m sources lie in the blue cloud. We find an evolution of the metallicity-mass relation corresponding to a decrease of 0: 21 +/- 0: 03 dex between the local value and the value at z - 0.77 in the 10(10)-10(11) M-circle dot range. We use the metallicity evolution to estimate the gas mass of the galaxies, which we compare with the galactic stellar mass assembly and star formation histories. Overall, our measurements are consistent with a galaxy evolution process dominated by episodic bursts of star formation and where star formation in the most massive galaxies (greater than or similar to 10(11) M-circle dot) ceases at z < 1.5 because of gas starvation.