Galaxy And Mass Assembly: Evolution of the Halpha luminosity function and star formation rate density up to z<0.35
Abstract
Measurements of the low-z Halpha luminosity function have a large dispersion in the local number density of sources, and correspondingly in the SFR density. The possible causes for these discrepancies include limited volume sampling, biases arising from survey sample selection, different methods of correcting for dust obscuration and AGN contamination. The Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) provide deep spectroscopic observations over a wide sky area enabling detection of a large sample of star-forming galaxies spanning 0.001<SFR(Halpha)<100 with which to robustly measure the evolution of the SFR density in the low-z universe. The large number of high SFR galaxies present in our sample allow an improved measurement of the bright end of the luminosity function, indicating that the decrease in number density of sources at bright luminosities is best described by a Saunders functional form rather than the traditional Schechter function. This result is consistent with other published luminosity functions in the FIR and radio. For GAMA and SDSS we find the r-band apparent magnitude limit, combined with the subsequent requirement for Halpha detection leads to an incompleteness due to missing bright Halpha sources with faint r-band magnitudes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1305.5308,
title = {Galaxy And Mass Assembly: Evolution of the Halpha luminosity function and star formation rate density up to z<0.35},
author = {M. L. P. Gunawardhana and A. M. Hopkins and J. Bland-Hawthorn and S. Brough and R. Sharp and J. Loveday and E. Taylor and D. H. Jones and M. A. Lara-López and A. E. Bauer and M. Colless and M. Owers and I. K. Baldry and A. R. López-Sánchez and C. Foster and S. Bamford and M. J. I. Brown and S. P. Driver and M. J. Drinkwater and J. Liske and M. Meyer and P. Norberg and A. S. G. Robotham and J. H. Y. Ching and M. E. Cluver and S. Croom and L. Kelvin and M. Prescott and O. Steele and D. Thomas and L. Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.5308},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
27 pages, 20 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS