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THE EVOLUTION of the GALAXY STELLAR MASS FUNCTION at z = 4-8: A STEEPENING LOW-MASS-END SLOPE with INCREASING REDSHIFT

Astrophysical Journal, ISSN: 1538-4357, Vol: 825, Issue: 1
2016
  • 264
    Citations
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  • 83
    Captures
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Metrics Details

  • Citations
    264
    • Citation Indexes
      264
  • Captures
    83

Article Description

We present galaxy stellar mass functions (GSMFs) at z = 4-8 from a rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) selected sample of ∼4500 galaxies, found via photometric redshifts over an area of ∼280 arcmin in the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS)/Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) fields and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The deepest Spitzer/IRAC data to date and the relatively large volume allow us to place a better constraint at both the low- and high-mass ends of the GSMFs compared to previous space-based studies from pre-CANDELS observations. Supplemented by a stacking analysis, we find a linear correlation between the rest-frame UV absolute magnitude at 1500 Å () and logarithmic stellar mass () that holds for galaxies with . We use simulations to validate our method of measuring the slope of the -M relation, finding that the bias is minimized with a hybrid technique combining photometry of individual bright galaxies with stacked photometry for faint galaxies. The resultant measured slopes do not significantly evolve over z = 4-8, while the normalization of the trend exhibits a weak evolution toward lower masses at higher redshift. We combine the -M distribution with observed rest-frame UV luminosity functions at each redshift to derive the GSMFs, finding that the low-mass-end slope becomes steeper with increasing redshift from at z = 4 to at z = 8. The inferred stellar mass density, when integrated over -10 M , increases by a factor of between z = 7 and z = 4 and is in good agreement with the time integral of the cosmic star formation rate density.

Bibliographic Details

Mimi Song; Steven L. Finkelstein; Matthew L. N. Ashby; A. Grazian; Yu Lu; Casey Papovich; Brett Salmon; Rachel S. Somerville; Mark Dickinson; K. Duncan; Sandy M. Faber; Giovanni G. Fazio; Henry C. Ferguson; Adriano Fontana; Yicheng Guo; Nimish Hathi; Seong-Kook Lee; Emiliano Merlin; S. P. Willner

American Astronomical Society

Physics and Astronomy; Earth and Planetary Sciences

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