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Published January 20, 2016 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

The Swift GRB Host Galaxy Legacy Survey - II. Rest-Frame NEAR-IR Luminosity Distribution and Evidence for a Near-Solar Metallicity Threshold

Abstract

We present rest-frame near-IR (NIR) luminosities and stellar masses for a large and uniformly selected population of gamma-ray burst (GRB) host galaxies using deep Spitzer Space Telescope imaging of 119 targets from the Swift GRB Host Galaxy Legacy Survey spanning 0.03 < z < 6.3, and we determine the effects of galaxy evolution and chemical enrichment on the mass distribution of the GRB host population across cosmic history. We find a rapid increase in the characteristic NIR host luminosity between z ~ 0.5 and z ~ 1.5, but little variation between z ~ 1.5 and z ~ 5. Dust-obscured GRBs dominate the massive host population but are only rarely seen associated with low-mass hosts, indicating that massive star-forming galaxies are universally and (to some extent) homogeneously dusty at high redshift while low-mass star-forming galaxies retain little dust in their interstellar medium. Comparing our luminosity distributions with field surveys and measurements of the high-z mass–metallicity relation, our results have good consistency with a model in which the GRB rate per unit star formation is constant in galaxies with gas-phase metallicity below approximately the solar value but heavily suppressed in more metal-rich environments. This model also naturally explains the previously reported "excess" in the GRB rate beyond z gsim 2; metals stifle GRB production in most galaxies at z < 1.5 but have only minor impact at higher redshifts. The metallicity threshold we infer is much higher than predicted by single-star models and favors a binary progenitor. Our observations also constrain the fraction of cosmic star formation in low-mass galaxies undetectable to Spitzer to be small at z < 4.

Additional Information

© 2016. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2015 April 9; accepted 2015 October 31; published 2016 January 19. This work is based 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. Support for this work was provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech associated with program GO-90062. Additional support for this work was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-51296.01-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. D.A.P. further acknowledges support from a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship within the Horizon 2020 European Union (EU) Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (H2020-MSCA-IF-2014-660113). The Dark Cosmology Centre is funded by the DNRF. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement no. EGGS-278202. S.S. acknowledges support from CONICYT-Chile FONDECYT 3140534, Basal-CATA PFB-06/2007, and Project IC120009 "Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS) of Iniciativa Científica Milenio del Ministerio de Economía, Fomento y Turismo. We thank the referee for many helpful suggestions that significantly improved this manuscript. We thank R. Ellis and D. A. Kann for helpful comments. We also wish to thank our many SHOALS collaborators involved in all aspects of the survey, and the entire Swift team for making this project possible.

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Published - Perley_2016p8.pdf

Submitted - 1504.02479v4.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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