SDSS-IV MaNGA: spatially resolved star formation histories and the connection to galaxy physical properties

Rowlands, Kate; Heckman, Timothy M.; Wild, Vivienne; Zakamska, Nadia L.; Rodríguez-Gómez, Vicente; Barrera-Ballesteros, Jorge K.; Lotz, Jennifer M.; Thilker, David A.; Andrews, Brett H.; Boquien, M.; Brinkmann, J.; Brownstein, Joel R.; Hwang, Hsiang-Chih; Smethurst, Rebecca

doi:10.1093/mnras/sty1916

Cited by 50 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 150 publications

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“…Such a situation is also expected for external galaxies, given the large amounts of observational evidence for inside-out galaxy formation (e.g. Pérez et al 2013;López Fernández et al 2018;Rowlands et al 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Milky Way analogues in MaNGA: multiparameter homogeneity and comparison to the Milky Way

Boardman

Zasowski

Seth

et al. 2019

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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The Milky Way provides an ideal laboratory to test our understanding of galaxy evolution, owing to our ability to observe our Galaxy over fine scales. However, connecting the Galaxy to the wider galaxy population remains difficult, due to the challenges posed by our internal perspective and to the different observational techniques employed. Here, we present a sample of galaxies identified as Milky Way Analogs (MWAs) on the basis of their stellar masses and bulge-to-total ratios, observed as part of the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey. We analyse the galaxies in terms of their stellar kinematics and populations as well as their ionised gas contents. We find our sample to contain generally young stellar populations in their outskirts. However, we find a wide range of stellar ages in their central regions, and we detect central AGN-like or composite-like activity in roughly half of the sample galaxies, with the other half consisting of galaxies with central star-forming emission or emission consistent with old stars. We measure gradients in gas metallicity and stellar metallicity that are generally flatter in physical units than those measured for the Milky Way; however, we find far better agreement with the Milky Way when scaling gradients by galaxies' disc scale lengths. From this, we argue much of the discrepancy in metallicity gradients to be due to the relative compactness of the Milky Way, with differences in observing perspective also likely to be a factor.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Milky Way analogues in MaNGA: multiparameter homogeneity and comparison to the Milky Way

Boardman

Zasowski

Seth

et al. 2019

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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“…• Spatially resolved SFHs computed using IFU data from surveys like SDSS-IV MaNGA and CAL-IFA allow us to better understand the correlation between the SFH and morphology and discriminate between inside-out vs outside-in scenarios for galaxy growth and quenching (Goddard et al 2016), better examine the connection between the physical properties of individual regions within galaxies and their SFHs (Rowlands et al 2018) and test scaling relations at different regimes Hsieh et al (2017). Care needs to be exercised in interpreting these results since we only see where the stellar populations are today.…”

Section: Galaxy Evolution Studies Enabled By Sfh Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonparametric Star Formation History Reconstruction with Gaussian Processes. I. Counting Major Episodes of Star Formation

Iyer¹,

Gawiser

Faber

et al. 2019

ApJ

127

103

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The star formation histories (SFHs) of galaxies contain imprints of the physical processes responsible for regulating star formation during galaxy growth and quenching. We improve the Dense Basis SFH reconstruction method of Iyer & Gawiser (2017), introducing a nonparametric description of the SFH based on the lookback times at which a galaxy assembles certain quantiles of its stellar mass. The method uses Gaussian Processes to create smooth SFHs that are independent of any functional form, with a flexible number of parameters that is adjusted to extract the maximum possible amount of SFH information from the SEDs being fit. We apply the method to reconstruct the SFHs of 48,791 galaxies with H < 25 at 0.5 < z < 3.0 across the five CANDELS fields. Using these SFHs, we study the evolution of galaxies as they grow more massive over cosmic time. We quantify the fraction of galaxies that show multiple major episodes of star formation, finding that the median time between two peaks of star formation is ∼ 0.42 +0.15 −0.10 t univ Gyr, where t univ is the age of the universe at a given redshift and remains roughly constant with stellar mass. Correlating SFHs with morphology, we find that studying the median SFHs of galaxies at 0.5 < z < 1.0 at the same mass (10 10 < M * < 10 10.5 M ) allows us to compare the timescales on which the SFHs decline for different morphological classifications, ranging from 0.60 −0.54 +1.54 Gyr for galaxies with spiral arms to 2.50 −1.50 +2.25 Gyr for spheroids. The Gaussian Process-based SFH description provides a general approach to reconstruct smooth, nonparametric SFH posteriors for galaxies with a flexible number of parameters that can be incorporated into Bayesian SED fitting codes to minimize the bias in estimating physical parameters due to SFH parametrization.

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“…timately, the presence of a dominant bulge could stabilize the gas disk against gravitational instabilities and hence prevent the formation of stars (e.g.,Lang et al 2014, and references therein).In this context, we hypothesize that the centrally concentrated star formation activity of most SFGs in the sample might reflect the growth of the bulge, which might precede the quenching of the galaxy from the inside-out (e.g.,Ellison et al 2018). At this late evolutionary stage, the bulge of massive galaxies is fully quenched, while star formation activity still take place at large radius (e.g.,Tacchella et al 2015;Rowlands et al 2018). Spatially resolved studies of low and high-mass SFGs at high redshift are needed to verify such a scenario, allowing us to understand how star formation, and hence stellar mass, is distributed in galaxies across cosmic time.2 We use this threshold as the number of z ∼ 0.35 starbursts is consistent with that derived from the standard ∆ log(SSFR) MS -based definition (seeFig.…”

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confidence: 93%

Radio continuum size evolution of star-forming galaxies over 0.35 < z < 2.25

Jiménez-Andrade

Magnelli

Karim

et al. 2019

A&A

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To better constrain the physical mechanisms driving star formation, we present the first systematic study of the radio continuum size evolution of star-forming galaxies (SFGs) over the redshift range 0.35 < z < 2.25. We use the VLA COSMOS 3GHz map (noise rms = 2.3 µJy beam −1 , θ beam = 0.75 arcsec) to construct a mass-complete sample of 3184 radio-selected SFGs that reside on and above the main-sequence (MS) of SFGs. We constrain the overall extent of star formation activity in galaxies by applying a 2D-Gaussian model to their radio continuum emission. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations are used to validate the robustness of our measurements and characterize the selection function. We find no clear dependence between the radio size and stellar mass, M , of SFGs with 10.5 log(M /M ) 11.5. Our analysis suggests that MS galaxies are preferentially extended, while SFGs above the MS are always compact. The median effective radius of SFGs on (above) the MS of R eff = 1.5 ± 0.2 (1.0 ± 0.2) kpc remains nearly constant with cosmic time; a parametrization of the form R eff ∝ (1 + z) α yields a shallow slope of only α = −0.26 ± 0.08 (0.12 ± 0.14) for SFGs on (above) the MS. The size of the stellar component of galaxies is larger than the extent of the radio continuum emission by a factor ∼2 (1.3) at z = 0.5 (2), indicating star formation is enhanced at small radii. The galactic-averaged star formation rate surface density (Σ SFR ) scales with the distance to the MS, except for a fraction of MS galaxies ( 10%) that harbor starburst-like Σ SFR . These "hidden" starbursts might have experienced a compaction phase due to disk instability and/or merger-driven burst of star formation, which may or may not significantly offset a galaxy from the MS. We thus propose to jointly use Σ SFR and distance to the MS to better identify the galaxy population undergoing a starbursting phase.

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SDSS-IV MaNGA: spatially resolved star formation histories and the connection to galaxy physical properties

Cited by 50 publications

References 150 publications

Milky Way analogues in MaNGA: multiparameter homogeneity and comparison to the Milky Way

Milky Way analogues in MaNGA: multiparameter homogeneity and comparison to the Milky Way

Nonparametric Star Formation History Reconstruction with Gaussian Processes. I. Counting Major Episodes of Star Formation

Radio continuum size evolution of star-forming galaxies over 0.35 < z < 2.25

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