Flat rotation curves and low velocity dispersions in KMOS star-forming galaxies at z ~ 1^⋆

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna, 6/2 Viale Berti Pichat, 40127 Bologna, Italy
² Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics – The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2611, Australia
e-mail: editeo@mso.anu.edu.au
³ Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, Postbus 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands
⁴ University of California – Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA

Received: 15 February 2016
Accepted: 18 July 2016

Abstract

The study of the evolution of star-forming galaxies requires the determination of accurate kinematics and scaling relations out to high redshift. In this paper we select a sample of 18 galaxies at z ~ 1, observed in the Hα emission line with KMOS, to derive accurate kinematics using a novel 3D analysis technique. We use the new code ^3DBarolo, which models the galaxy emission directly in 3D observational space, without the need to extract kinematic maps. This major advantage of this technique is that it is not affected by beam smearing and thus it enables the determination of rotation velocity and intrinsic velocity dispersion, even at low spatial resolution. We find that (1) the rotation curves of these z ~ 1 galaxies rise very steeply within few kiloparsecs and remain flat out to the outermost radius and (2) the Hα velocity dispersions are low, ranging from 15 to 40 km s^-1, which leads to V/σ = 3–10. These characteristics are similar to those of disc galaxies in the local Universe. Finally, we also report no significant evolution of the stellar-mass Tully-Fisher relation. Our results show that disc galaxies are kinematically mature and rotation-dominated at z ~ 1 already.