Galaxies 09: Assembly, Gas Content and Star Formation History of Galaxies

Thomas Greve
MPIA

A LABOCA survey of the ECDFS: the submillimeter properties of near-infrared selected galaxies

The 330hr ESO-MPG 870-micron survey of the Extended Chandra Deep Field South (ECDFS) obtained with the Large Apex BOlometer CAmera (LABOCA) on the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX), was used to carry out a stacking analysis at 870-micron of a sample of 8266 $K_{vega} \le 20$ selected galaxies from the Multi-wavelength Survey by Yale-Chile (MUSYC). Subsamples of 744 starforming BzK galaxies (sBzKs), 1253 extremely red objects (EROs) and 737 distant red galaxies (DRGs) all have significant stacked submm signals. A delineation of the average submm signal from $K_{vega} \le 20$ selected galaxies as a function of (photometric) redshift, and find a decline in the average submm signal (and therefore IR luminosity and star formation rate) by a factor $\sim 2-3$ from $z\sim 2$ to $z\sim 0$. This is in line with a cosmic star formation history in which the star formation activity in galaxies increases significantly at $z > 1$. By mapping the stacked 870-micron signal across the $B-z$ vs. $z-K$ diagram we have confirmed the ability of the sBzK-selection criterion to select starforming galaxies at $z > 1.5$.

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