The infrared emission of ultraviolet-selected galaxies from z = 0 to z = 1

¹ Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, OAMP, Université Aix-Marseille, CNRS, 38 rue Frédéric Joliot-Curie, 13388 Marseille Cedex 13, France e-mail: [veronique.buat;denis.burgarella;elodie.giovannoli]@oamp.fr
² Institute for Advanced Research, Nagoya University, Japan e-mail: takeuchi@iar.nagoya-u.ac.jp
³ Division of Particle and Astrophysical Sciences, Nagoya University, Japan e-mail: murata.katsuhiro@g.mbox.nagoya-u.ac.jp

Received: 10 March 2009
Accepted: 16 July 2009

Abstract

Aims. We want to study the IR (>m) emission of galaxies selected on the basis of their rest-frame UV light in a very homogeneous way (wavelength and luminosity) from to . We compare their UV and IR rest-frame emission to study the evolution in dust attenuation with z as well as to check if a UV selection is capable of tracking all star formation. This UV selection will also be compared to a sample of Lyman break galaxies selected at .

Methods. We select galaxies in UV (1500–1800 Å) rest-frame at , , , and with as Lyman break galaxies at , the samples are compiled to sample the same range of luminosity at any redshift. The UV rest-frame data come from GALEX for and the U-band of the EIS survey (at ). The UV data are combined with the IRAS 60 μm observations at and the Spitzer data at m for sources. The evolution in the IR and UV luminosities with z is analysed for individual galaxies as well as in terms of luminosity functions.

Results. The ratio is used to measure dust attenuation. This ratio does not seem to evolve significantly with z for the bulk of our sample galaxies, but some trends are found for both galaxies with a strong dust attenuation and UV luminous sources: galaxies with are more frequent at than at , and the largest values of are found for UV faint objects; in contrast, the most luminous galaxies of our samples (), detected at , exhibit a lower dust attenuation than fainter ones. The value of increases with the K rest-frame luminosity of the galaxies at all redshifts considered and shows a residual anticorrelation with L_UV. The most massive and UV luminous galaxies exhibit quite high specific star formation rates. Lyman break galaxies exhibit systematically lower dust attenuation than UV-selected galaxies of same luminosity, but similar specific star formation rates. The analysis of the UV + IR luminosity functions leads to the conclusion that up to , most of the star formation activity of UV-selected galaxies is emitted in IR. Although we are able to infer information about all the star formation from our UV selection at , at we miss a large fraction of galaxies more luminous than . The effect is found to be larger for Lyman break galaxies.