English

Downsizing of Star Formation Measured from the Clustered Infrared Background Correlated with Quasars

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-08-06 v2

Abstract

Powerful quasars can be seen out to large distances. As they reside in massive dark matter haloes, they provide a useful tracer of large scale structure. We stack Herschel-SPIRE images at 250, 350 and 500 microns at the location of 11,235 quasars in ten redshift bins spanning 0.5z3.50.5 \leq z \leq 3.5. The unresolved dust emission of the quasar and its host galaxy dominate on instrumental beam scales, while extended emission is spatially resolved on physical scales of order a megaparsec. This emission is due to dusty star-forming galaxies clustered around the dark matter haloes hosting quasars. We measure radial surface brightness profiles of the stacked images to compute the angular correlation function of dusty star-forming galaxies correlated with quasars. We then model the profiles to determine large scale clustering properties of quasars and dusty star-forming galaxies as a function of redshift. We adopt a halo model and parameterize it by the most effective halo mass at hosting star-forming galaxies, finding log(Meff/M)=13.80.1+0.1\log(M_\mathrm{eff}/M_{\odot}) = 13.8^{+0.1}_{-0.1} at z=2.212.32z=2.21-2.32, and, at z=0.50.81z=0.5-0.81, the mass is log(Meff/M)=10.70.2+1.0\log(M_\mathrm{eff}/M_{\odot}) = 10.7^{+1.0}_{-0.2}. Our results indicate a downsizing of dark matter haloes hosting dusty star-forming galaxies between 0.5z2.90.5 \leq z \leq 2.9. The derived dark matter halo masses are consistent with other measurements of star-forming and sub-millimeter galaxies. The physical properties of dusty star-forming galaxies inferred from the halo model depend on details of the quasar halo occupation distribution in ways that we explore at z>2.5z>2.5, where the quasar HOD parameters are not well constrained.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.08632,
  title  = {Downsizing of Star Formation Measured from the Clustered Infrared Background Correlated with Quasars},
  author = {Kirsten R. Hall and Devin Crichton and Tobias Marriage and Nadia L. Zakamska and Rachel Mandelbaum},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.08632},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 35 pages, 30 figures, 2 tables