Stellar Mass Function of Lyman Break Galaxies: Theoretical Perspective

• Published in: Chinese physics letters Vol. 23; no. 4; pp. 1061 - 1064
• Main Authors: Liu, Xiao-Liang, Huang, Yong-Qing, Liu, Nian-Hua, Lai, Zhen-Quan, Shu, Cheng-Gang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing 01.04.2006
• ISSN: 0256-307X; 1741-3540
• DOI: 10.1088/0256-307X/23/4/083

Adopting the observational distributions of star formation rates and half-light radii of Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) in the rest frame UV, we investigate empirically the predicted stellar mass function for LBGs. It is found that a peak exists at mass around 1.5X1010M for their stellar mass function and there have been significant amount of LBGs with stellar masses higher than 1011M at z~3. There should be two families for LBG population observed by the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) (which is a key instrument in the infrared space telescope Spitzer), one is red and the other is blue, which are consistent with recent works. Moreover, the predicted comoving correlation lengths for LBGs with different stellar masses, i.e., with different 8 is a subset of m magnitudes, are also discussed. The red LBGs should be clustered in space more strongly than the blue LBGs. These predictions can and will be tested by the observations of IRAC, and will provide strong constraints on the current hierarchical galaxy formation model.