Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2005-12-06
Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.367:331-338,2006
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Accepted by MNRAS. Data available at http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/ahopkins/phoenix/
Scientific paper
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2005.09954.x
We estimate the star-formation rates and the stellar masses of the Extremely Red objects (EROs) detected in a 180arcmin2 Ks-band survey (Ks~20mag). This sample is complemented by sensitive 1.4GHz radio observations (12micro-Jy; 1sigma rms) and multiwaveband photometric data (UBVRIJ) as part of the Phoenix Deep Survey. For bright K<19.5mag EROs in this sample (I-K>4mag; total of 177) we use photometric methods to discriminate dust-enshrouded active systems from early-type galaxies and to constrain their redshifts. Radio stacking is then employed to estimate mean radio flux densities of 8.6 (3sigma) and 6.4micro-Jy (2.4sigma) for the dusty and early-type subsamples respectively. Assuming that dust enshrouded active EROs are powered by star-formation the above radio flux density at the median redshift of z=1 translates to a radio luminosity of 4.5e22W/Hz and a star-formation rate of SFR=25Mo/yr. Combining this result with photometric redshift estimates we find a lower limit to the star-formation rate density of ~0.02Mo/yr/Mpc^3 for the K<19.5mag dusty EROs in the range z=0.85-1.35. Comparison with the SFR density estimated from previous ERO samples (with similar selection criteria) using optical emission lines, suffering dust attenuation, suggests a mean dust reddening of at least E(B-V)~0.5 for this population. We further use the Ks-band luminosity as proxy to stellar mass and argue that the dust enshrouded EROs in our sample are massive systems, M>5e10Mo. We also find that EROs represent a sizable fraction (~50%) of the number density of galaxies more massive than M=5e10Mo at z~1, with almost equal contributions from dusty and early types. Similarly, we find that EROs contribute about half of the mass density of the Universe at z~1 after taking into account incompleteness because of the limit K=19.5mag.
Afonso Jose
Cram Lawrence E.
Georgakakis Antonis
Hopkins Andrew M.
Mobasher Bahram
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