The Variability of Star Formation Rate in Galaxies. II. Power Spectrum Distribution on the Main Sequence

E Wang, SJ Lilly - The Astrophysical Journal, 2020 - iopscience.iop.org
E Wang, SJ Lilly
The Astrophysical Journal, 2020iopscience.iop.org
We constrain the temporal power spectrum of the specific star formation rate of star-forming
galaxies, using a well-defined sample of main sequence galaxies from MaNGA and our
earlier measurements of the ratio of the star formation rate averaged within the last 5 Myr to
that averaged over the last 800 Myr. We explore the assumptions of stationarity and
ergodicity that are implicit in this approach. We assume a single power-law form of the
power spectrum distribution (PSD) but introduce an additional free parameter, the" intrinsic …
Abstract
We constrain the temporal power spectrum of the specific star formation rate of star-forming galaxies, using a well-defined sample of main sequence galaxies from MaNGA and our earlier measurements of the ratio of the star formation rate averaged within the last 5 Myr to that averaged over the last 800 Myr. We explore the assumptions of stationarity and ergodicity that are implicit in this approach. We assume a single power-law form of the power spectrum distribution (PSD) but introduce an additional free parameter, the" intrinsic scatter", to try to account for any non-ergodicity introduced from various sources. We analyze both an" integrated" sample consisting of global measurements of all of the galaxies, as well as 25 subsamples obtained by considering five radial regions and five bins of integrated stellar mass. Assuming that any intrinsic scatter is not the dominant contribution to the main sequence dispersion of galaxies, we find that the PSDs have slopes between 1.0 and 2.0, indicating that the power (per log interval of frequency) is mostly contributed by longer-timescale variations. We find a correlation between the returned PSDs and the inferred gas depletion times (
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