On the Evolution of the Molecular Gas Fraction of Star-Forming Galaxies

Abstract

We present IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometric detections of CO (J = 1 → 0) emission from a 24 μm-selected sample of star-forming galaxies at z = 0.4. The galaxies have polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon 7.7 μm-derived star formation rates of SFR ~30-60 M _sun yr^-1 and stellar masses M _sstarf ~ 10¹¹ M _sun. The CO (J = 1 → 0) luminosities of the galaxies imply that the disks still contain a large reservoir of molecular gas, contributing ~20% of the baryonic mass, but have star formation "efficiencies" similar to local quiescent disks and gas-dominated disks at z ~ 1.5-2. We reveal evidence that the average molecular gas fraction has undergone strong evolution since z ~ 2, with f _gas vprop (1 + z)^~2±0.5. The evolution of f _gas encodes fundamental information about the relative depletion/replenishment of molecular fuel in galaxies and is expected to be a strong function of halo mass. We show that the latest predictions for the evolution of the molecular gas fraction in semi-analytic models of galaxy formation within a ΛCDM universe are supported by these new observations.