English

Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Bivariate functions of H$\alpha$ star forming galaxies

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-06-23 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

We present bivariate luminosity and stellar mass functions of Hα\alpha star forming galaxies drawn from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. While optically deep spectroscopic observations of GAMA over a wide sky area enable the detection of a large number of 0.001<SFRHα0.001<{SFR}_{H\alpha} (M_{\odot} yr1^{-1})<100<100 galaxies, the requirement for an Hα\alpha detection in targets selected from an rr-band magnitude limited survey leads to an incompleteness due to missing optically faint star forming galaxies. Using z<0.1z<0.1 bivariate distributions as a reference we model the higher-zz distributions, thereby approximating a correction for the missing optically faint star forming galaxies to the local SFR and stellar mass densities. Furthermore, we obtain the rr-band LFs and stellar mass functions of Hα\alpha star forming galaxies from the bivariate LFs. As our sample is selected on the basis of detected Hα\alpha emission, a direct tracer of on-going star formation, this sample represents a true star forming galaxy sample, and is drawn from both photometrically classified blue and red sub-populations, though mostly from the blue population. On average 20-30% of red galaxies at all stellar masses are star forming, implying that these galaxies may be dusty star forming systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.2557,
  title  = {Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Bivariate functions of H$\alpha$ star forming galaxies},
  author = {M. L. P. Gunawardhana and A. M. Hopkins and E. N. Taylor and J. Bland-Hawthorn and P. Norberg and I. K. Baldry and J. Loveday and M. S. Owers and S. M. Wilkins and M. Colless and M. J. I. Brown and S. P. Driver and M. Alpaslan and S. Brough and M. Cluver and S. Croom and L. Kelvin and M. A. Lara-López and J. Liske and A. R. López-Sánchez and A. S. G. Robotham},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.2557},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

27 pages, 21 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS