Star Formation Histories of Galaxies in COSMOS2020 at Redshift z ~ 0.5–2

Star Formation Histories (SFH) tell us how and when a galaxy formed its stars, connecting its Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) to its past evolution. SFHs contain information that can be used to find characteristics of galaxies such as their age, stellar mass, star formation rate, and quenching timescales. SFHs have generally come from spectra, however, with recent improvements to SED fitting and new high quality photometric data it may be possible to obtain detailed SFHs through SED fitting of photometric data. We explored this by fitting SEDs to photometry from the COSMOS2020 survey, which provides a panchromatic view into the universe, probing galaxies as early as the first billion years, with coverage in up to 38 bands over 2 square degrees of the sky. SED fitting was done using Dense Basis, a state of the art Bayesian SED fitter, to find the median estimated SFHs for a large sample of galaxies with a redshift between 0.5 and 2.