4.7 Article

THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTIONS OF STAR-FORMING AND QUIESCENT GALAXIES TO z=4 FROM THE COSMOS/UltraVISTA SURVEY

Journal

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 777, Issue 1, Pages -

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/777/1/18

Keywords

galaxies: evolution; galaxies: fundamental parameters; galaxies: high-redshift; galaxies: luminosity function, mass function

Funding

  1. NASA through Space Telescope Science Institute [HST_AR_12141.01]
  2. NASA [NAS-26555]
  3. Tufts University Mellon Research Fellowship in Arts and Sciences
  4. ERC-StG [EGGS-278202]
  5. Danish National Research Foundation
  6. European Research Council
  7. Royal Society
  8. Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/J001422/1] Funding Source: researchfish
  9. STFC [ST/J001422/1] Funding Source: UKRI

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We present measurements of the stellarmass functions (SMFs) of star-forming and quiescent galaxies to z = 4 using a sample of 95,675 K-s-selected galaxies in the COSMOS/UltraVISTA field. The SMFs of the combined population are in good agreement with previous measurements and show that the stellar mass density of the universe was only 50%, 10%, and 1% of its current value at z similar to 0.75, 2.0, and 3.5, respectively. The quiescent population drives most of the overall growth, with the stellar mass density of these galaxies increasing as rho(star) proportional to (1 + z)(-4.7+/-0.4) since z = 3.5, whereas the mass density of star-forming galaxies increases as rho(star) proportional to (1 + z)(-2.3+/-0.2). At z > 2.5, star-forming galaxies dominate the total SMF at all stellar masses, although a non-zero population of quiescent galaxies persists to z = 4. Comparisons of the K-s-selected star-forming galaxy SMFs with UV-selected SMFs at 2.5 < z < 4 show reasonable agreement and suggest that UV-selected samples are representative of the majority of the stellar mass density at z > 3.5. We estimate the average mass growth of individual galaxies by selecting galaxies at fixed cumulative number density. The average galaxy with log (M-star/M-circle dot) = 11.5 at z = 0.3 has grown in mass by only 0.2 dex (0.3 dex) since z = 2.0 (3.5), whereas those with log(M-star/M-circle dot) = 10.5 have grown by > 1.0 dex since z = 2. At z < 2, the time derivatives of the mass growth are always larger for lower-mass galaxies, which demonstrates that the mass growth in galaxies since that redshift is mass-dependent and primarily bottom-up. Lastly, we examine potential sources of systematic uncertainties in the SMFs and find that those from photo-z templates, stellar population synthesis modeling, and the definition of quiescent galaxies dominate the total error budget in the SMFs.

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