Issue |
A&A
Volume 475, Number 1, November III 2007
|
|
---|---|---|
Page(s) | 83 - 99 | |
Section | Cosmology (including clusters of galaxies) | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:20077506 | |
Published online | 04 September 2007 |
The spatial clustering of mid-IR selected star forming galaxies at z ~ 1 in the GOODS fields
1
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) – Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, via Ranzani 1, 40127 Bologna, Italy e-mail: roberto.gilli@oabo.inaf.it
2
Laboratoire AIM, CEA/DSM – CNRS – Université Paris Diderot, DAPNIA/SAp, Orme des Merisiers, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
3
Spitzer Science Center, California Institute of Technology, Mail Stop 220-6, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
4
National Optical Astronomy Observatory, PO Box 26732, Tucson, AZ 85726, USA
5
University of Massachusetts, Astronomy Dept, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
6
Max-Planck Institut für Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 1, 85748 Garching b. München, Germany
7
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
8
Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) – Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, via G. Tiepolo 11, 34131 Trieste, Italy
Received:
19
March
2007
Accepted:
27
July
2007
We present the first spatial clustering measurements of
, 24 μm-selected, star forming galaxies in the Great
Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS). The sample under
investigation includes 495 objects in GOODS-South and 811 objects in
GOODS-North selected down to flux densities of
Jy and
mag, for which spectroscopic redshifts are available.
The median redshift, IR luminosity and star formation rate (SFR) of
the sample are
,
,
and
yr-1, respectively. We measure the
projected correlation function
on scales of
Mpc, from which we derive a best fit comoving
correlation length of
Mpc and slope of
for the whole
Jy sample after
combining the two fields. We find indications of a larger correlation
length for objects of higher luminosity, with Luminous Infrared
Galaxies (LIRGs,
) reaching
Mpc. This would imply that galaxies with larger SFRs are
hosted in progressively more massive halos, reaching minimum halo
masses of ~
for LIRGs. We compare our
measurements with the predictions from semi-analytic models based on
the Millennium simulation. The variance in the models is used to
estimate the errors in our GOODS clustering measurements, which are
dominated by cosmic variance. The measurements from the two GOODS
fields are found to be consistent within the errors. On scales of the
GOODS fields, the real sources appear more strongly clustered than
objects in the Millennium-simulation based catalogs, if the selection
function is applied consistently. This suggests that star formation at
is being hosted in more massive halos and denser
environments than currently predicted by galaxy formation
models. Mid-IR selected sources appear also to be more strongly
clustered than optically selected ones at similar redshifts in deep
surveys like the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey and the VIMOS-VLT Deep
Survey (VVDS), although the significance of this result is
when accounting for cosmic variance. We find that LIRGs at
are consistent with being the direct descendants of Lyman
Break Galaxies and UV-selected galaxies at
, both in term
of number densities and clustering properties, which would suggest
long lasting star-formation activity in galaxies over cosmological
timescales. The local descendants of
star forming
galaxies are not luminous IR galaxies but are more likely to be
normal,
ellipticals and bright spirals.
Key words: galaxies: evolution / cosmology: large-scale structure of Universe / cosmology: observations
© ESO, 2007
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