GAMA/DEVILS: constraining the cosmic star formation history from improved measurements of the 0.3–2.2  μm extragalactic background light

Abstract

We present a revised measurement of the optical extragalactic background light (EBL), based on the contribution of resolved galaxies to the integrated galaxy light (IGL). The cosmic optical background radiation (COB), encodes the light generated by star-formation, and provides a wealth of information about the cosmic star formation history (CSFH). We combine wide and deep galaxy number counts from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey (GAMA) and Deep Extragalactic VIsible Legacy Survey (DEVILS), along with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) archive and other deep survey datasets, in 9 multi-wavelength filters to measure the COB in the range from 0.35 μm to 2.2 μm. We derive the luminosity density in each band independently and show good agreement with recent and complementary estimates of the optical-EBL from very high-energy (VHE) experiments. Our error analysis suggests that the IGL and γ-ray measurements are now fully consistent to within $\sim 10{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$, suggesting little need for any additional source of diffuse light beyond the known galaxy population. We use our revised IGL measurements to constrain the cosmic star-formation history, and place amplitude constraints on a number of recent estimates. As a consistency check, we can now demonstrate convincingly, that the CSFH, stellar mass growth, and the optical-EBL provide a fully consistent picture of galaxy evolution. We conclude that the peak of star-formation rate lies in the range 0.066–0.076 M⊙ yr−1 Mpc−3 at a lookback time of 9.1 to 10.9 Gyrs.

Cosmographic model of the astroparticle skies

“…The SFR density at lookback times larger than 1 Gyr, shown as a black solid line, follows the Fermi-LAT constraints parametrized by Ref. [16] (see Table 5, initial SFR normalization). The local overdensity at shorter lookback times in the Northern and Southern hermispheres as well as in the Zone of Avoidance are estimated from our catalog and illustrated by colored lines, as labeled in the figure.…”

“…Figure 1:The star formation history from cosmic dawn down to the past billion year. The SFR density at lookback times larger than 1 Gyr, shown as a black solid line, follows the Fermi-LAT constraints parametrized by Ref [16]. (see Table5, initial SFR normalization).…”

Deep Extragalactic VIsible Legacy Survey (DEVILS): consistent multiwavelength photometry for the DEVILS regions (COSMOS, XMMLSS, and ECDFS)

“…While the merits and failings of these approaches can be argued -through numerous tests we have found that the P F approach is far less likely to go catastrophically wrong and produces more robust photometric measurements. For full details on P F and numerous tests, we refer the reader to the code description paper and four recent applications to the DEVILS input catalogue (Davies et al 2018), GAMA photometry (Bellstedt et al 2020), the VISTA VIKING datasets (Koushan et al 2021) and evolution of the high redshift stellar mass function (Adams et al 2020).…”

“…catalogues to produce deep galaxy number counts as an additional photometric validation, for the purposes of exploring the overall galaxy population in broader studies, and for tuning numerical simulations of the galaxy distribution. These number counts have recently been used in Koushan et al (2021) to measure the Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) from the UV-MIR. Hence, we do not go into detail regarding the scientific implications of these distributions, but simply produce them and make available to the wider community.…”

“…We note that our deep number counts are measured consistently across all bands, with only small differences between fields at faint magnitudes. These counts extend to faint magnitudes over a large area ∼6 deg 2 , making them the state-of-the-art in using galaxy number counts to explore the Universal distribution of flux at a given wavelength (Koushan et al 2021). We therefore provide these for use in the larger community in a tabulated form in Table 5.…”