The effect of mass and morphology on the mass assembly of galaxies

¹ Departamento de Física de la Tierra y Astrofísica, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Pl. Ciencias, 1, Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
² Instituto de Física de Partículas y del Cosmos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Pl. Ciencias, 1, Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
³ Centro de Astrobiología, (CAB), CSIC-INTA, Carretera de Ajalvir km 4, E-28850 Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain
⁴ Departamento de Física Teórica, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, E-28049 Cantoblanco, Madrid, Spain
⁵ Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, A. P. 106, Ensenada, 22800 BC, Mexico

^⋆ Corresponding author; arcamps@ucm.es

Received: 31 December 2023
Accepted: 13 August 2024

Abstract

The pace at which galaxies grew into their current stellar masses and how this growth is regulated is still not fully understood, nor is the role that morphology plays in this process. We applied full spectral fitting techniques with pyPipe3D to the MaNGA sample to obtain its star formation and stellar mass histories and used these to investigate the mass assembly of galaxies by measuring how their specific star formation correlates to their stellar mass at different look-back times. We find that the correlation between these two parameters was shallower in the past. Galaxies used to have similar mass doubling times and the current negative correlation between the specific star formation and M_* is primarily due to more massive galaxies ‘dropping’ off the main sequence earlier than less massive ones. Additionally, selecting the galaxies into bins based on their present-day morphology shows a segregation in specific star formation rate (sSFR) that is maintained even at high look-back times, showing that the factors that determine which morphology a galaxy ends up in are in place at very early times. Similarly, selecting them based on their current star formation status shows that, on average, currently retired galaxies used to have slightly a higher sSFR before the drop-off, whereas galaxies that have continued to form stars until today had a lower sSFR initially. We compare our results to a set of cosmic surveys, finding partial agreement in our results with several of them, though with significant offsets in redshift. Finally, we discuss how our results fit with certain theoretical models on galaxy evolution as well as cosmological simulations.