COSMOS Morphological Classification with the Zurich Estimator of Structural Types (ZEST) and the Evolution Since z = 1 of the Luminosity Function of Early, Disk, and Irregular Galaxies
- Creators
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Scarlata, C.
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Carollo, C. M.
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Lilly, S.
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Sargent, M. T.
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Feldmann, R.
- Kampczyk, P.
- Porciani, C.
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Koekemoer, A. M.
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Scoville, N.
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Kneib, J.-P.
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Leauthaud, A.
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Massey, R.
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Rhodes, J.
- Tasca, L.
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Capak, P.
- Maier, C.
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McCracken, H. J.
- Mobasher, B.
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Renzini, A.
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Taniguchi, Y.
- Thompson, D.
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Sheth, K.
- Ajiki, M.
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Aussel, H.
- Murayama, T.
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Sanders, D. B.
- Sasaki, S.
- Shioya, Y.
- Takahashi, M.
Abstract
Motivated by the desire to reliably and automatically classify structure of thousands of COSMOS galaxies, we present ZEST, the Zurich Estimator of Structural Types. To classify galaxy structure, ZEST uses (1) five nonparametric diagnostics: asymmetry, concentration, Gini coefficient, second-order moment of the brightest 20% of galaxy pixels, and ellipticity; and (2) the exponent n of single-Sérsic fits to the two-dimensional surface brightness distributions. To fully exploit the wealth of information while reducing the redundancy present in these diagnostics, ZEST performs a principal component (PC) analysis. We use a sample of ~56,000 I_(AB) ≤ 24 COSMOS galaxies to show that the first three PCs fully describe the key aspects of the galaxy structure, i.e., to calibrate a three-dimensional classification grid of axes PC_1, PC_2, and PC_3. We demonstrate the robustness of the ZEST grid on the z = 0 sample of Frei et al. The ZEST classification breaks most of the degeneracy between different galaxy populations that affects morphological classifications based on only some of the diagnostics included in ZEST. As a first application, we present the evolution since z ~ 1 of the luminosity functions (LFs) of COSMOS galaxies of early, disk, and irregular galaxies and, for disk galaxies, of different bulge-to-disk ratios. Overall, we find that the LF up to a redshift z = 1 is consistent with a pure luminosity evolution (of about 0.95 mag at z ~ 0.7). We highlight, however, two trends that are in general agreement with a downsizing scenario for galaxy formation, i.e., (1) a deficit of a factor of about 2 at z ~ 0.7 of M_B > -20.5 structurally classified early-type galaxies and (2) an excess of a factor of about 3, at a similar redshift, of irregular galaxies.
Additional Information
© 2007 American Astronomical Society. Print publication: Issue 1 (2007 September); received 2006 April 25, accepted for publication 2006 November 5. The HST COSMOS Treasury program was supported through NASA grant HST-GO-09822.We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the entire COSMOS collaboration. More information on the COSMOS survey is available at http://cosmos.astro .caltech.edu.We thank the NASA IPAC/IRSA staff for providing online archive and server capabilities for the COSMOS data sets. C. S. acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Facilities: HST (ACS)Attached Files
Published - SCAapjss07.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 17712
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20100309-143207444
- HST-GO-09822
- NASA
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- Created
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2010-03-10Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- COSMOS, Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)