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Stellar Populations and Formation Histories of Massive Galaxies Derived from Deep Hubble Space Telescope Grism Data

Presentation #219.06D in the session “High Redshift Galaxies”.

Published onJan 11, 2021
Stellar Populations and Formation Histories of Massive Galaxies Derived from Deep Hubble Space Telescope Grism Data

Understanding the correlations between mass, morphology, stellar populations, and formation history in galaxies is difficult, primarily due to the uncertainties in galaxy star-formation histories. Star-formation histories are better constrained for higher redshift galaxies, observed closer to their formation and quenching epochs. These properties in high redshift galaxies can be difficult to do from ground-based telescopes, as they are subject to higher backgrounds and a high density of telluric (night-sky) emission lines. The HST/WFC3 grism grant us access to (low-resolution) restframe optical spectrum for galaxies at ~ 1 < z < 2. The age and metallicity features present at these wavelengths, along with the sample sizes provided by grism surveys, allow us to better constrain stellar populations and star-formation histories. In my talk, I will discuss research using a forward modeling technique to fit deep HST grism data from the CLEAR (CANDELS Lyα Emission at Reionization) survey. Work which includes studying the mass - stellar metallicity relationship, where we find that massive quiescent galaxies up to a redshift of ~ 1.8 have ~ solar stellar metallicities. As well as a study on the relationship between morphology and formation redshift (when the galaxy formed ~ 50% of their mass) using “non-parametric” star-formation histories, where we find that quiescent galaxies with the highest stellar-mass surface density, log(Σ1) > 10.25, show a minimum formation redshift.

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