Deconstructing the galaxy stellar mass function with UKIDSS and CANDELS: the impact of colour, structure and environment

Abstract

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.