HELP: star formation as function of galaxy environmentwith Herschel
Abstract
The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project (HELP) brings together a vast range of data from many astronomical observatories. Its main focus is on the Herschel data, which maps dust obscured star formation over 1300 deg. With this unprecedented combination of data sets, it is possible to investigate how the star formation vs stellar mass relation (main-sequence) of star-forming galaxies depends on environment. In this pilot study we explore this question between 0.1 < z < 3.2 using data in the COSMOS field. We estimate the local environment from a smoothed galaxy density field using the full photometric redshift probability distribution. We estimate star formation rates by stacking the SPIRE data from the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES). Our analysis rules out the hypothesis that the main-sequence for star-forming systems is independent of environment at 1.5 < z < 2, while a simple model in which the mean specific star formation rate declines with increasing environmental density gives a better description. However, we cannot exclude a simple hypothesis in which the main-sequence for star-forming systems is independent of environment at z < 1.5 and z > 2. We also estimate the evolution of the star formation rate density in the COSMOS field and our results are consistent with previous measurements at z < 1.5 and z > 2 but we find a times higher peak value of the star formation rate density at .
Cite
@article{arxiv.1606.05377,
title = {HELP: star formation as function of galaxy environmentwith Herschel},
author = {S. Duivenvoorden and S. Oliver and V. Buat and B. Darvish and A. Efstathiou and D. Farrah and M. Griffin and P. D. Hurley and E. Ibar and M. Jarvis and A. Papadopoulos and M. T. Sargent and D. Scott and J. M. Scudder and M. Symeonidis and M. Vaccari and M. P. Viero and L. Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.05377},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
14 pages, 7 figures. MNRAS accepted