CLEAR: The Morphological Evolution of Galaxies in the Green Valley
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Quiescent galaxies having more compact morphologies than star-forming galaxies has been a consistent result in the field of galaxy evolution. What is not clear is at what point this divergence happens, i.e., when do quiescent galaxies become compact, and how big of a role does the progenitor effect play in this result? Here we aim to model the morphological and star formation histories of high-redshift (0.8 < z < 1.65) massive galaxies ( log ( M / M ⊙ ) > 10.2) with stellar population fits using Hubble Space Telescope/WFC3 G102 and G141 grism spectra plus photometry from the CANDELS Lyα Emission at Reionization (CLEAR) survey, constraining the star formation histories for a sample of ∼400 massive galaxies using flexible star formation histories. We develop a novel approach to classifying galaxies by their star formation activity in a way that highlights the green valley population, by modeling the specific star formation rate distributions as a function of redshift and deriving the probability that a galaxy is quiescent (P Q ). Using PQ and our flexible star formation histories we outline the evolutionary paths of our galaxies in relation to stellar mass, Sérsic index, effective radius R eff, and stellar mass surface density. We find that the galaxies show no appreciable stellar mass growth after entering the green valley (a net decrease of 4%) while their stellar mass surface densities increase by ∼0.25 dex. Therefore galaxies are becoming compact during the green valley and this is due to an increase in the Sérsic index and a decrease in R eff
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 115 |
| Journal | Astrophysical Journal |
| Volume | 951 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| ISSN | 0004-637X |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
We thank our colleagues on the CLEAR team for their valuable conversations and contributions. We are also grateful to the anonymous referee whose comments have improved the quality and clarity of this paper. V.E.C. acknowledges support from the NASA Headquarters under the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award 19-ASTRO19-0122. This work is based on data obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope through program number GO-14227. Support for Program number GO-14227 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through grants AST 1614668. The authors acknowledge the Texas A&M University Brazos HPC cluster and Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing Resources (HPRC, http://hprc.tamu.edu ) that contributed to the research reported here.
Funding Information:
We thank our colleagues on the CLEAR team for their valuable conversations and contributions. We are also grateful to the anonymous referee whose comments have improved the quality and clarity of this paper. V.E.C. acknowledges support from the NASA Headquarters under the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) award 19-ASTRO19-0122. This work is based on data obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope through program number GO-14227. Support for Program number GO-14227 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through grants AST 1614668. The authors acknowledge the Texas A&M University Brazos HPC cluster and Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing Resources (HPRC,http://hprc.tamu.edu) that contributed to the research reported here.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
ID: 374397680