Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): linking star formation histories and stellar mass growth

We present evidence for stochastic star formation histories in low-mass (M* < 1010 M⊙) galaxies from observations within the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. For ˜73 000 galaxies between 0.05 < z < 0.32, we calculate star formation rates (SFR) and specific star formation rates (SSFR = SFR/M*) from spectroscopic Hα measurements and apply dust corrections derived from Balmer decrements. We find a dependence of SSFR on stellar mass, such that SSFRs decrease with increasing stellar mass for star-forming galaxies, and for the full sample, SSFRs decrease as a stronger function of stellar mass. We use simple parametrizations of exponentially declining star formation histories to investigate the dependence on stellar mass of the star formation time-scale and the formation redshift. We find that parametrizations previously fit to samples of z ˜ 1 galaxies cannot recover the distributions of SSFRs and stellar masses observed in the GAMA sample between 0.05 < z < 0.32. In particular, a large number of low-mass (M* < 1010 M⊙) galaxies are observed to have much higher SSFRs than can be explained by these simple models over the redshift range of 0.05 < z < 0.32, even when invoking mass-dependent staged evolution. For such a large number of galaxies to maintain low stellar masses, yet harbour such high SSFRs, requires the late onset of a weak underlying exponentially declining star formation history with stochastic bursts of star formation superimposed

Star Formation in a Stellar Mass Selected Sample of Galaxies to z=3 from the GOODS NICMOS Survey (GNS)

We present a study of the star-forming properties of a stellar mass-selected sample of galaxies in the GOODS NICMOS Survey (GNS), based on deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging of the GOODS North and South fields. Using a stellar mass selected sample, combined with HST/ACS and Spitzer data to measure both UV and infrared derived star formation rates (SFR), we investigate the star forming properties of a complete sample of ~1300 galaxies down to log M*=9.5 at redshifts 1.5<z<3. Eight percent of the sample is made up of massive galaxies with M*>10^11 Msun. We derive optical colours, dust extinctions, and ultraviolet and infrared SFR to determine how the star formation rate changes as a function of both stellar mass and time. Our results show that SFR increases at higher stellar mass such that massive galaxies nearly double their stellar mass from star formation alone over the redshift range studied, but the average value of SFR for a given stellar mass remains constant over this 2 Gyr period. Furthermore, we find no strong evolution in the SFR for our sample as a function of mass over our redshift range of interest, in particular we do not find a decline in the SFR among massive galaxies, as is seen at z < 1. The most massive galaxies in our sample (log M*>11) have high average SFRs with values, SFR(UV,corr) = 103+/-75 Msun/yr, yet exhibit red rest-frame (U-B) colours at all redshifts. We conclude that the majority of these red high-redshift massive galaxies are red due to dust extinction. We find that A(2800) increases with stellar mass, and show that between 45% and 85% of massive galaxies harbour dusty star formation. These results show that even just a few Gyr after the first galaxies appear, there are strong relations between the global physical properties of galaxies, driven by stellar mass or another underlying feature of galaxies strongly related to the stellar mass.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Planning a Virtual Conference: Tips from the TOPkit Team

Factors that make a virtual conference great require a dedicated team, careful planning, and a variety of technological tools. The TOPkit (Teaching Online Preparation Toolkit) Workshop team reveals the secrets of their virtual workshop planning process, including strategies and tools for virtual teamwork, project management, constructing the conference program, selecting virtual platforms and websites, and communications and promotions, laying the foundation for planning your own successful virtual event

Unproceedings of the Fourth .Astronomy Conference (.Astronomy 4), Heidelberg, Germany, July 9-11 2012

The goal of the .Astronomy conference series is to bring together astronomers, educators, developers and others interested in using the Internet as a medium for astronomy. Attendance at the event is limited to approximately 50 participants, and days are split into mornings of scheduled talks, followed by 'unconference' afternoons, where sessions are defined by participants during the course of the event. Participants in unconference sessions are discouraged from formal presentations, with discussion, workshop-style formats or informal practical tutorials encouraged. The conference also designates one day as a 'hack day', in which attendees collaborate in groups on day-long projects for presentation the following morning. These hacks are often a way of concentrating effort, learning new skills, and exploring ideas in a practical fashion. The emphasis on informal, focused interaction makes recording proceedings more difficult than for a normal meeting. While the first .Astronomy conference is preserved formally in a book, more recent iterations are not documented. We therefore, in the spirit of .Astronomy, report 'unproceedings' from .Astronomy 4, which was held in Heidelberg in July 2012.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, .Astronomy 4, #dotastr

Galaxy and mass assembly (GAMA): End of survey report and data release 2

The Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey is one of the largest contemporary spectroscopic surveys of lowredshift galaxies. Covering an area of ~286 deg2 (split among five survey regions) down to a limiting magnitude of r < 19.8 mag, we have collected spectra and reliable redshifts for 238 000 objects using the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. In addition, we have assembled imaging data from a number of independent surveys in order to generate photometry spanning the wavelength range 1 nm-1 m. Here, we report on the recently completed spectroscopic survey and present a series of diagnostics to assess its final state and the quality of the redshift data. We also describe a number of survey aspects and procedures, or updates thereof, including changes to the input catalogue, redshifting and re-redshifting, and the derivation of ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared photometry. Finally, we present the second public release ofGAMAdata. In this release, we provide input catalogue and targeting information, spectra, redshifts, ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared photometry, single-component Śersic fits, stellar masses, Hα-derived star formation rates, environment information, and group properties for all galaxies with r < 19.0 mag in two of our survey regions, and for all galaxies with r < 19.4 mag in a third region (72 225 objects in total). The data base serving these data is available at http://www.gama-survey.org/

Suppression of Star Formation in the central 200 kpc of a z = 1.4 Galaxy Cluster [Erratum added]

We present the results of an extended narrow-band H{\alpha} study of the massive galaxy cluster XMMU J2235.3-2557 at z = 1.39. This paper represents a follow up study to our previous investigation of star-formation in the cluster centre, extending our analysis out to a projected cluster radius of 1.5 Mpc. Using the Near InfraRed Imager and Spectrograph (NIRI) on Gemini North we obtained deep H narrow-band imaging corresponding to the rest-frame wavelength of H{\alpha} at the cluster's redshift. We identify a total of 163 potential cluster members in both pointings, excluding stars based on their near-IR colours derived from VLT/HAWK-I imaging. Of these 163 objects 14 are spectroscopically confirmed cluster members, and 20% are excess line-emitters. We find no evidence of star formation activity within a radius of 200 kpc of the brightest cluster galaxy in the cluster core. Dust-corrected star formation rates (SFR) of excess emitters outside this cluster quenching radius, RQ \sim 200 kpc, are on average = 2.7 \pm 1.0 M\odot yr-1, but do not show evidence of increasing star-formation rates toward the extreme 1.5 Mpc radius of the cluster. No individual cluster galaxy exceeds an SFR of 6 M\odot yr-1 . Massive galaxies (log M\ast /M\odot > 10.75) all have low specific SFRs (SSFRs, i.e. SFR per unit stellar mass). At fixed stellar mass, galaxies in the cluster centre have lower SSFRs than the rest of the cluster galaxies, which in turn have lower SSFRs than field galaxies at the same redshift by a factor of a few to 10. For the first time we can demonstrate through measurements of individual SFRs that already at very early epochs (at an age of the Universe of \sim4.5 Gyr) the suppression of star-formation is an effect of the cluster environment which persists at fixed galaxy stellar mass. [Erratum added after the original paper]Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS. New version: Erratum added after the original paper (2 pages, 3 corrected figures). Due to an error in the original computation the SFR values had to be increased by a factor of 5. However, the results and conclusions remain largely unchange

SAMI - A new multi-object IFS for the Anglo-Australian telescope

SAMI (Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph) has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of galaxies, with spatially-resolved spectroscopy of large numbers of targets. It is the first on-sky application of innovative photonic imaging bundles called hexabundles, which will remove the aperture effects that have biased previous single-fibre multi-object astronomical surveys. The hexabundles have lightly-fused circular multi-mode cores with a covering fraction of ∼ 73%. The thirteen hexabundles in SAMI, each have 61 fibre cores, and feed into the AAOmega spectrograph at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). SAMI was installed at the AAT in July 2011 and the first commissioning results prove the effectiveness of hexabundles on sky. A galaxy survey of several thousand galaxies to z ∼ 0.1 will begin with SAMI in mid-2012

Galaxy and mass assembly (GAMA) : The wavelength-dependent sizes and profiles of galaxies revealed by MegaMorph

We investigate the relationship between colour and structure within galaxies using a large, volume-limited sample of bright, low-redshift galaxies with optical-near-infrared imaging from the Galaxy AndMass Assembly survey.We fit single-component,wavelength-dependent, elliptical Sérsic models to all passbands simultaneously, using software developed by the MegaMorph project. Dividing our sample by n and colour, the recovered wavelength variations in effective radius (Re) and Sérsic index (n) reveal the internal structure, and hence formation history, of different types of galaxies. All these trends depend on n; some have an additional dependence on galaxy colour. Late-type galaxies (nr 2.5), even though they maintain constant n with wavelength, revealing that ellipticals are a superimposition of different stellar populations associated with multiple collapse and merging events. Processes leading to structures with larger Re must be associated with lower metallicity or younger stellar populations. This appears to rule out the formation of young cores through dissipative gas accretion as an important mechanism in the recent lives of luminous elliptical galaxies.Peer reviewe