1. COSMOS-Web: The emergence of the Hubble Sequence
- Author
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Huertas-Company, M., Shuntov, M., Dong, Y., Walmsley, M., Ilbert, O., McCracken, H. J., Akins, H. B., Allen, N., Casey, C. M., Costantin, L., Daddi, E., Dekel, A., Franco, M., Garland, I. L., Géron, T., Gozaliasl, G., Hirschmann, M., Kartaltepe, J. S., Koekemoer, A. M., Lintott, C., Liu, D., Lucas, R., Masters, K., Pacucci, F., Paquereau, L., P'erez-Gonz'alez, P. G., Rhodes, J. D., Robertson, B. E., Simmons, B., Smethurst, R., Toft, S., and Yang, L.
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies ,Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics - Abstract
Leveraging the wide area coverage of the COSMOS-Web survey, we quantify the abundance of different morphological types from $z\sim 7$ with unprecedented statistics and establish robust constraints on the epoch of emergence of the Hubble sequence. We measure the global (spheroids, disk-dominated, bulge-dominated, peculiar) and resolved (stellar bars) morphologies for about 400,000 galaxies down to F150W=27 using deep learning, representing a two-orders-of-magnitude increase over previous studies. We then provide reference Stellar Mass Functions (SMFs) of different morphologies between $z\sim 0.2$ and $z\sim 7$ and best-fit parameters to inform models of galaxy formation. All catalogs and data are made publicly available. (a)At redshift z > 4.5, the massive galaxy population ($\log M_*/M_\odot>10$) is dominated by disturbed morphologies (~70%) -- even in the optical rest frame -- and very compact objects (~30%) with effective radii smaller than ~500pc. This confirms that a significant fraction of the star formation at cosmic dawn occurs in very dense regions, although the stellar mass for these systems could be overestimated.(b)Galaxies with Hubble-type morphologies -- including bulge and disk-dominated galaxies -- arose rapidly around $z\sim 4$ and dominate the morphological diversity of massive galaxies as early as $z\sim 3$. (c)Using stellar bars as a proxy, we speculate that stellar disks in massive galaxies might have been common (>50%) among the star-forming population since cosmic noon ($z\sim2$-2.5) and formed as early as $z\sim 7$ (d)Massive quenched galaxies are predominantly bulge-dominated from z~4 onward, suggesting that morphological transformations briefly precede or are simultaneous to quenching mechanisms at the high-mass end. (e) Low-mass ($\log M_*/M_\odot<10$) quenched galaxies are typically disk-dominated, pointing to different quenching routes in the two ends of the stellar mass spectrum from cosmic dawn., Comment: subnmitted to A&A. Comments Welcome
- Published
- 2025