The relation between star formation rate and stellar mass of galaxies at z \(\sim\) 1-4

Abstract

The relation between the Star Formation Rate (SFR) and stellar mass (\({\rm M}_{\star}\)) of galaxies represents a fundamental constraint on galaxy formation and has been studied extensively both in observations and cosmological simulations. However, the observed amplitude has not been successfully reproduced in simulations, indicating either that the halo accretion history and baryonic physics are poorly modeled or that observations contain biases. We examine the evolution of the SFR\(-{\rm M}_{\star}\) relation of \(z\sim1-4 \) galaxies and display the inconsistency between observed relations that are obtained using different techniques. We employ cosmological hydrodynamic simulations and compare these with a range of observed SFR\(-{\rm M}_{\star}\) relations. We find that numerical results are consistent with observations that use Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) techniques to estimate star formation rates and dust corrections. On the contrary, simulations are not able to reproduce results that were obtained by combining only UV and IR luminosities. These imply SFRs at a fixed stellar mass that are larger almost by a factor of 5 than those of SED measurements for \(z \sim1.5-4\). Furthermore, we find remarkable agreement between the numerical results from various authors who have employed different cosmological codes and run simulations with different resolutions. This is interesting for two reasons. A) simulations can produce realistic populations of galaxies within representative cosmological volumes even at relatively modest resolutions. B) It is likely that current numerical codes that rely on similar subgrid multiphase Inter-Stellar Medium (ISM) models and are tuned to reproduce statistical properties of galaxies, produce similar results for the SFR\(-{\rm M}_{\star}\) relation by construction, regardless of resolution, box size and, to some extent, the adopted feedback prescriptions.