Luminosity function of [OII] emission-line galaxies in the MassiveBlack-II simulation

KwangHo Park, Tiziana Di Matteo, Shirley Ho, Rupert Croft, Stephen M. Wilkins, Yu Feng, Nishikanta Khandai

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
August 20, 2015

The authors examine the luminosity function (LF) of [OII] emission-line galaxies in the high-resolution cosmological simulation MassiveBlack-II (MBII). From the spectral energy distribution of each galaxy, the authors select a sub-sample of star-forming galaxies at 0.06≤z≤3.0 using the [OII] emission line luminosity L([OII]). The authors confirm that the specific star formation rate matches that in the GAMA survey. The authors show that the [OII] LF at z=1.0 from the MBII shows a good agreement with the LFs from several surveys below L([OII])=1043.0 erg/s while the low redshifts (z≤0.3) show an excess in the prediction of bright [OII] galaxies, but still displaying a good match with observations below L([OII])=1041.6 erg/s. Based on the validity in reproducing the properties of [OII] galaxies at low redshift (z≤1), the authors forecast the evolution of the [OII] LF at high redshift (z≤3), which can be tested by upcoming surveys such as the HETDEX and DESI. The slopes of the LFs at bright and faint ends range from -3 to -2 showing minima at z=2. The slope of the bright end evolves approximately as 1/(z+1) at z=2 while the faint end evolves as ~3/(z+1) at 0.6≤z≤2. In addition, a similar analysis is applied for the evolution of [OIII] LFs, which is to be explored in the forthcoming survey WFIRST-AFTA. Finally, the authors show that the auto-correlation function of [OII] and [OIII] emitting galaxies shows a rapid evolution from z=2 to 1.



Featured Fellows

Yu Feng

Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics
BIDS Alum – Data Science Fellow