Morphological Classification of High-redshift Massive Galaxies in the COSMOS/UltraVISTA Field

Abstract

Utilizing the multi-band photometry catalog of the COSMOS (Cosmic Evolution Survey)/UltraVISTA (Ultra-deep Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) field and the high-resolution HST WFC3 (Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3) near-infrared imaging from the CANDELS (Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey) field, we present a quantitative study of the morphological classification of galaxy for a large mass-selected sample. Our sample includes 362 galaxies within photometric redshift 1leq zleq3 and stellar mass M_{*}geq 10^{10.5} M_{odot}. The results from the rest-frame (U-V) vs. (V-J) (UVJ) colors classification, visual inspection, nonparametric morphology analysis, and structural parameters study are in good agreement with each other. Quiescent galaxies (QGs) classified by UVJ colors generally have larger Sérsic index (n) and Gini coefficient (G), smaller size (r_mathrm{e}) and moment (M_{20}), and they are visually compact. While star-forming galaxies (SFGs) are reversed. In the meantime, we explore the size evolution with redshift for various divisions of QG and SFG samples, and confirm that both of size will enlarge with time, but QGs are rapider than SFGs. Moreover, we find that the choice of division between QGs and SFGs (i.e. colour, shape, morphology) is not particularly critical.