Analysis of stellar masses, computed by inverting the τ_dep scaling relation by Tacconi et al. (2020) as explained in Appendix A. Left panel: Position of the z-GAL (and pilot) sources in the SFR vs. M^* space. The red solid lines depict the MS of star-forming galaxies (Speagle et al. 2014) and the dotted lines mark the ±0.5 dex region around the MS. Both SFR and M^* are determined modulo the unknown magnification factor μ. The arrow in the lower-right panel indicates the effect of applying a magnification correction with μ = 5 and E = 1.2. Right panel: Distance from the MS, Δlog(MS) = log(μSFR/sSFR(MS,z,M^*)), as a function of stellar mass, M^*. The dotted horizontal lines represent the range ±0.5 dex from the MS (dashed line). The position of z-GAL galaxies is marked with filled circles and literature data are as in Fig. 10. The median uncertainty of the quantities derived for z-GAL galaxies is shown in the bottom left. See Sect. 6 and Appendix A for more details.