Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001aas...19916011b&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 199th AAS Meeting, #160.11; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 34, p.571
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We present the first results on the history of star formation in the Universe based on the `cosmic spectrum', in particular, the volume-averaged stellar absorption line spectrum of present day galaxies from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. This method is novel in that unlike previous studies it is not a luminosity density based estimator. The cosmic spectrum is fitted with models of population synthesis, tracing the history of star formation prior to the epoch of the observed galaxies, using a method we have developed which decouples continuum and spectral-line variations and is robust against spectrophotometric uncertainties. The cosmic spectrum can only be fitted with models incorporating chemical evolution and indicates there was a peak of star-formation rate in the past of at least three times the current value and that the increase back to z=1 scales as (1+z)β with a strong upper limit of β <5. We find in the general case there is some model degeneracy between star formation at low and high redshift. However, if we incorporate previous work on star formation at z<1 we can put strong upper limits on the SFR at z>1: e.g., if β >2 then the SFR between z=1 and 5 scales as (1+z)α with α <2. This is equivalent to stating that no more than 80% of stars in the Universe formed at z>1. Our results are consistent with the best-fit results from compilations of cosmic SFR estimates based on UV luminosity density which give 1.8<β <2.9 and -1.0<α <0.7. KG and IKB acknowledge generous funding from the David and Lucille Packard foundation.
2dFGRS Team
Baldry Ivan K.
Glazebrook Kark
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