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The Velocity Dispersion Function for Massive Quiescent and Star-forming Galaxies at 0.6 < z ≤ 1.0

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  • Lance Taylor
  • Rachel Bezanson
  • Arjen van der Wel
  • Alan Pearl
  • Eric F. Bell
  • Francesco D’Eugenio
  • Marijn Franx
  • Michael V. Maseda
  • Adam Muzzin
  • David Sobral
  • Caroline Straatman
  • Katherine E. Whitaker
  • Po-Feng Wu
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Article number90
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>9/11/2022
<mark>Journal</mark>The Astrophysical Journal
Issue number2
Volume939
Number of pages8
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

We present the first direct spectroscopic measurement of the stellar velocity dispersion function (VDF) for massive quiescent and star-forming galaxies at 0.6 < z ≤ 1.0. For this analysis we use individual measurements of stellar velocity dispersion from high-signal-to-noise-ratio spectra from the public Large Early Galaxy Astrophysics Census (LEGA-C) survey. We report a remarkable stability of the VDF for both quiescent and star-forming galaxies within this redshift range, though we note the presence of weak evolution in the number densities of star-forming galaxies. We compare both VDFs with previous direct and inferred measurements at local and intermediate redshifts, with the caveat that previous measurements of the VDF for star-forming galaxies are poorly constrained at all epochs. We emphasize that this work is the first to directly push to low stellar velocity dispersion (σ ⋆ > 100 km s−1) and extend to star-forming galaxies. We are largely consistent with the high-sigma tail measured from BOSS, and we find that the VDF remains constant from the median redshift of LEGA-C, z ∼ 0.8, to the present day.