Bibcode
Livermore, R. C.; Jones, T.; Richard, J.; Bower, R. G.; Ellis, R. S.; Swinbank, A. M.; Rigby, J. R.; Smail, Ian; Arribas, S.; Rodriguez-Zaurin, J.; Colina, L.; Ebeling, H.; Crain, R. A.
Referencia bibliográfica
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 427, Issue 1, pp. 688-702.
Fecha de publicación:
11
2012
Número de citas
104
Número de citas referidas
94
Descripción
We present Hubble Space Telescope/Wide Field Camera 3 narrow-band
imaging of the Hα emission in a sample of eight gravitationally
lensed galaxies at z = 1-1.5. The magnification caused by the foreground
clusters enables us to obtain a median source plane spatial resolution
of 360 pc, as well as providing magnifications in flux ranging from
˜10× to ˜50×. This enables us to identify
resolved star-forming H II regions at this epoch and therefore study
their Hα luminosity distributions for comparisons with equivalent
samples at z ˜ 2 and in the local Universe. We find evolution in
the both luminosity and surface brightness of H II regions with
redshift. The distribution of clump properties can be quantified with an
H II region luminosity function, which can be fit by a power law with an
exponential break at some cut-off, and we find that the cut-off evolves
with redshift. We therefore conclude that 'clumpy' galaxies are seen at
high redshift because of the evolution of the cut-off mass; the galaxies
themselves follow similar scaling relations to those at z = 0, but their
H II regions are larger and brighter and thus appear as clumps which
dominate the morphology of the galaxy. A simple theoretical argument
based on gas collapsing on scales of the Jeans mass in a marginally
unstable disc shows that the clumpy morphologies of high-z galaxies are
driven by the competing effects of higher gas fractions causing
perturbations on larger scales, partially compensated by higher
epicyclic frequencies which stabilize the disc.
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