Exploring the Green Valley with the dark energy survey: studying the evolution of galaxies
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2023
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Abstract
We investigate the properties of galaxies located at the so-called Green Valley, an intermediate region between the blue-cloud of active star- forming galaxies, and the red-sequence of quenched and "dead" galaxies, visible in a color vs stellar mass diagram for galaxies.We utilize data from multiple releases of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), to characterize galaxies based on their physical properties, and to correlate their location in a stellar mass vs color diagram with their morphologies.We selected a sample of high-quality photometric data from the Year 3 re- lease of the Dark Energy Survey, with redshifts ranging from local z ∼ 0, to intermediate z ∼ 1.5, and cleaned it by applying a set of different quality selection criteria. We obtained a number of measurements for the photometric redshifts of the galaxies, by employing different parametric algorithms, to study each evolution separately as a function of distance. With the use of LePHARE, a template fitting code, we measured a set of physical properties of the galaxies that are helpful to study their evo- lution, and to assess the transitional nature of galaxies inside the Green Valley. These are, mainly, the Absolute Magnitude, the Stellar Mass, the Star Formation Rate and the UV Luminosity.We made use of two catalogues for morphological prediction available for the Year 3 release. These catalogues allowed us to better constrain the relation between the morphological structures of galaxies and their evolutionary stage.Results show that combining SED template fitting algorithms with mor- phological analysis allows to constrain the bi-modality distribution even when working with optical surveys, up to redshifts of z = 1.5.This is a first approach on the use of these methods to pave the way more massive and intensive data treatment surveys, like the future LSST survey to be done with the Vera Rubin Telescope.
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Tesis (Master of Science in Astrophysics)--Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2023