A Selection of Hα Emitters at z = 2.1–2.5 Using the K s -band Photometry of ZFOURGE

Autor: Yasunori Terao, Lee R. Spitler, Kentaro Motohara, Nuo Chen
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Astrophysical Journal. 941:70
ISSN: 1538-4357
0004-637X
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac9fce
Popis: Large and less-biased samples of star-forming galaxies are essential to investigate galaxy evolution. H$\rm\alpha$ emission line is one of the most reliable tracers of star-forming galaxies because its strength is directly related to recent star formation. However, it is observationally expensive to construct large samples of H$\rm\alpha$ emitters by spectroscopic or narrow-band imaging survey at high-redshifts. In this work, we demonstrate a method to extract H$\rm\alpha$ fluxes of galaxies at $z=2.1$-$2.5$ from $K_s$ broad-band photometry of ZFOURGE catalog. Combined with 25-39 other filters, we estimate the emission line fluxes by SED fitting with stellar population models that incorporate emission-line strengths. 2005 galaxies are selected as H$\rm\alpha$ emitters by our method and their fluxes show good agreement with previous measurements in the literature. On the other hand, there are more H$\rm\alpha$ luminous galaxies than previously reported. The discrepancy can be explained by extended H$\rm\alpha$ profiles of massive galaxies and a luminosity dependence of dust attenuation, which are not taken into account in the previous work. We also find that there are a large number of low-mass galaxies with much higher specific star formation rate (sSFR) than expected from the extrapolated star formation main sequence. Such low-mass galaxies exhibit larger ratios between H$\rm\alpha$ and UV fluxes compared to more massive high sSFR galaxies. This result implies that a ``starburst'' mode may differ among galaxies: low-mass galaxies appear to assemble their stellar mass via short-duration bursts while more massive galaxies tend to experience longer-duration ($>10\ \mathrm{Myr}$) bursts.
Comment: 18 pages, 19 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ
Databáze: OpenAIRE