Stellar Mass Growth of Brightest Cluster Galaxy Progenitors in COSMOS Since z ∼ 3

Creators: Cooke, Kevin C.; Kartaltepe, Jeyhan S.; Tyler, K. D.; Darvish, Behnam; Casey, Caitlin M.; Le Fèvre, Olivier; Salvato, Mara; Scoville, Nicholas

Abstract

We examine the role of environment on the in situ star formation (SF) hosted by the progenitors of the most massive galaxies in the present-day universe, the brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs), from z ~ 3 to present in the COSMOS field. Progenitors are selected from the COSMOS field using a stellar mass cut motivated by the evolving cumulative comoving number density of progenitors within the Illustris simulation, as well as the Millennium-II simulation and a constant comoving number density method for comparison. We characterize each progenitor using far-ultraviolet–far-infrared observations taken from the COSMOS field and fitting stellar, dust, and active galactic nucleus components to their spectral energy distributions. Additionally, we compare the SF rates of our progenitor sample to the local density maps of the COSMOS field to identify the effects of environment. We find that BCG progenitors evolve in three stages, starting with an in situ SF-dominated phase (z > 2.25). This is followed by a phase until z ~ 1.25 where mass growth is driven by in situ SF and stellar mass deposited by mergers (both gas rich and poor) on the same order of magnitude independent of local environment. Finally, at low redshift dry mergers are the dominant stellar mass generation process. We also identify this final transition period as the time when progenitors quench, exhibiting quiescent NUVrJ colors.

Additional Information

© 2019 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2019 May 8; revised 2019 June 29; accepted 2019 July 8; published 2019 August 22. We thank the referee for the constructive feedback that improved the clarity of this work. Support for this work was provided by NASA through grants HST-GO-13657.010-A and HST-AR-14298.004-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. Support and observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained from the Data Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., were also provided by NASA through grant NNX16AB36G as part of the Astrophysics Data Analysis Program. Spectral energy distribution fitting was performed using the scientific computing resources of the Rochester Institute of Technology ION cluster. B.D. acknowledges financial support from NASA through the Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP), grant No. NNX12AE20G, and the National Science Foundation, grant No. 1716907. We thank Paul Torrey for his council on evolving number density methodology. We thank the generous advice of Elisabete da Cunha and Stefano Berta on the use of MAGPHYS and SED3FIT, respectively. This research made use of Astropy,7 a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Robitaille et al. 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018). This research made use of the iPython environment (Perez & Granger 2007) and the Python packages SciPy (Jones et al. 2001), NumPy (van der Walt et al. 2011), and Matplotlib (Hunter 2007). Based on observations made with the NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer. GALEX is operated for NASA by the California Institute of Technology under NASA contract NAS5-98034. MegaPrime/MegaCam, a joint project of CFHT and CEA/DAPNIA, at the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) which is operated by the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada, the Institut National des Sciences de l'Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France, and the University of Hawaii. Based (in part) on data collected at Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Based on observations obtained with WIRCam, a joint project of CFHT, Taiwan, Korea, Canada, and France. This work is based (in part) on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. Herschel is an ESA space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led Principal Investigator consortia and with important participation from NASA. This work was supported by a NASA Keck PI Data Award, administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. Data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory from telescope time allocated to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through the agency's scientific partnership with the California Institute of Technology and the University of California. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

Attached Files

Published - Cooke_2019_ApJ_881_150.pdf

Accepted Version - 1907.04337.pdf

Files

1907.04337.pdf

Files (4.3 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
1907.04337.pdf md5:1c444a3a6657c3265a0cfcffd862e11b	2.3 MB	Preview Download
Cooke_2019_ApJ_881_150.pdf md5:1180476e8adb47881a896b4c535f1756	2.0 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes