Browsing by Author "Hartley, William G."

We combine photometry from the Ultra Deep Survey (UDS), Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) UDS and CANDELS the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey-South (GOODS-S) surveys to construct the galaxy stellar mass function probing both the low- and high-mass end accurately in the redshift range 0.3 < z < 3. The advantages of using a homogeneous concatenation of these data sets include meaningful measures of environment in the UDS, due to its large area (0.88 deg²), and the high-resolution deep imaging in CANDELS (H₁₆₀ > 26.0), affording us robust measures of structural parameters. We construct stellar mass functions for the entire sample as parametrized by the Schechter function, and find that there is a decline in the values of φ and of α with higher redshifts, and a nearly constant M* up to z ̃ 3. We divide the galaxy stellar mass function by colour, structure, and environment and explore the links between environmental overdensity, morphology, and the quenching of star formation. We find that a double Schechter function describes galaxies with high Sérsic index (n > 2.5), similar to galaxies which are red or passive. The low-mass end of the n > 2.5 stellar mass function is dominated by blue galaxies, whereas the high-mass end is dominated by red galaxies. This shows that there is a possible link between morphological evolution and star formation quenching in high mass galaxies, which is not seen in lower mass systems. This in turn suggests that there are strong mass-dependent quenching mechanisms. In addition, we find that the number density of high-mass systems is elevated in dense environments, suggesting that an environmental process is building up massive galaxies quicker in over densities than in lower densities.

We investigate the prevalence of galactic-scale outflows in post-starburst (PSB) galaxies at high redshift (1 < z < 1.4), using the deep optical spectra available in the UKIDSS Ultra Deep Survey (UDS). We use a sample of ∼40 spectroscopically confirmed PSBs, recently identified in the UDS field, and perform a stacking analysis in order to analyse the structure of strong interstellar absorption features such as Mg II (λ2800 Å). We find that for massive (M_* > 10^{10} M_{\odot }) PSBs at z > 1, there is clear evidence for a strong blue-shifted component to the Mg II absorption feature, indicative of high-velocity outflows (v_out∼ 1150± 160 km s^{-1}) in the interstellar medium. We conclude that such outflows are typical in massive PSBs at this epoch, and potentially represent the residual signature of a feedback process that quenched these galaxies. Using full spectral fitting, we also obtain a typical stellar velocity dispersion σ_* for these PSBs of ∼ 200 km s^{-1}, which confirms they are intrinsically massive in nature (dynamical mass M_d∼ 10^{11} M_{\odot }). Given that these high-z PSBs are also exceptionally compact (r_e ∼ 1-2 kpc) and spheroidal (Sérsic index n ∼ 3), we propose that the outflowing winds may have been launched during a recent compaction event (e.g. major merger or disc collapse) that triggered either a centralized starburst or active galactic nuclei (AGN) activity. Finally, we find no evidence for AGN signatures in the optical spectra of these PSBs, suggesting they were either quenched by stellar feedback from the starburst itself, or that if AGN feedback is responsible, the AGN episode that triggered quenching does not linger into the post-starburst phase.