A selection of H{\alpha} emitters at z = 2.1-2.5 using the Ks-band photometry of ZFOURGE

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method to identify Hα emitters at redshift 2.1-2.5 using broad-band Ks photometry from ZFOURGE, revealing more luminous galaxies and insights into star formation modes across galaxy masses.

Contribution

It introduces a new SED fitting technique to extract Hα fluxes from broad-band photometry, expanding the sample of high-redshift star-forming galaxies and analyzing their starburst behaviors.

Findings

More Hα luminous galaxies identified than previous studies.

Low-mass galaxies show higher sSFR and different starburst modes.

Extended Hα profiles and dust attenuation affect luminosity estimates.

Abstract

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.