Evolution of the Most Massive Galaxies to z=0.6: I. A New Method for Physical Parameter Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a PCA-based method to estimate key physical parameters of massive galaxies from low S/N spectra, revealing evolution in star formation activity and AGN presence from z=0.6 to today.

Contribution

It presents a novel PCA approach to derive galaxy physical parameters from spectra, improving accuracy and efficiency over traditional spectral indices.

Findings

Star formation activity declines with mass but flattens above 10^{11.5}Msun at z~0.6.

Half of the emission in massive star-forming galaxies at z~0.6 is from AGNs.

Evolution shows a tenfold decrease in star-forming galaxies at 10^{12}Msun from z=0.6 to now.

Abstract

We use principal component analysis (PCA) to estimate stellar masses, mean stellar ages, star formation histories (SFHs), dust extinctions and stellar velocity dispersions for ~290,000 galaxies with stellar masses greater than $10^{11}Msun and redshifts in the range 0.4<z<0.7 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). We find the fraction of galaxies with active star formation first declines with increasing stellar mass, but then flattens above a stellar mass of 10^{11.5}Msun at z~0.6. This is in striking contrast to z~0.1, where the fraction of galaxies with active star formation declines monotonically with stellar mass. At stellar masses of 10^{12}Msun, therefore, the evolution in the fraction of star-forming galaxies from z~0.6 to the present-day reaches a factor of ~10. When we stack the spectra of the most massive, star-forming galaxies at z~0.6, we find that half of their [OIII] emission is produced by AGNs. The black holes in these galaxies are accreting on average at ~0.01 the Eddington rate. To obtain these results, we use the stellar population synthesis models of Bruzual & Charlot (2003) to generate a library of model spectra with a broad range of SFHs, metallicities, dust extinctions and stellar velocity dispersions. The PCA is run on this library to identify its principal components over the rest-frame wavelength range 3700-5500A. We demonstrate that linear combinations of these components can recover information equivalent to traditional spectral indices such as the 4000A break strength and HdA, with greatly improved S/N. This method is able to recover physical parameters such as stellar mass-to-light ratio, mean stellar age, velocity dispersion and dust extinction from the relatively low S/N BOSS spectra. We examine the sensitivity of our stellar mass estimates to the input parameters in our model library and the different stellar population synthesis models.