The miniJPAS survey: Evolution of luminosity and stellar mass functions of galaxies up to z~0.7

Abstract

We aim to develop a robust methodology for constraining the luminosity and stellar mass functions (LMFs) of galaxies by solely using photometric measurements from multi-filter imaging surveys. We test the potential of these techniques for determining the evolution of these functions up to $z 0.7$ in the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS), which will image thousands of square degrees in the northern hemisphere with an unprecedented photometric system that includes $54$ narrow band filters. As J-PAS is still an ongoing survey, we used the miniJPAS dataset (a stripe of $1$ deg$^2$ dictated according to the J-PAS strategy) for determining the LMFs of galaxies at $0.05 z 0.7$. Stellar mass and $B$-band luminosity for each of the miniJPAS galaxies are constrained using an updated version of our fitting code for spectral energy distribution, MUlti-Filter FITting (MUFFIT), whose values are based on non-parametric composite stellar population models and the probability distribution functions of the miniJPAS photometric redshifts. Galaxies are classified according to their star formation activity through the stellar mass versus rest-frame colour diagram corrected for extinction (MCDE) and we assign a probability to each source of being a quiescent or star-forming galaxy. Different stellar mass and luminosity completeness limits are set and parametrised as a function of redshift, for setting the limitations of our flux-limited sample ($r_ SDSS 22$) for the determination of the miniJPAS LMFs. The miniJPAS LMFs are parametrised according to Schechter-like functions via a novel maximum likelihood method accounting for uncertainties, degeneracies, probabilities, completeness, and priors. Overall, our results point to a smooth evolution with redshift ($0.05 z 0.7$) of the miniJPAS LMFs, which is in agreement with previous studies. The LMF evolution of star-forming galaxies mainly involve the bright and massive ends of these functions, whereas the LMFs of quiescent galaxies also exhibit a non-negligible evolution in their faint and less massive ends. The cosmic evolution of the global $B$-band luminosity density decreases by $ 0.1$ dex from $z=0.7$ to $0.05$; whereas for quiescent galaxies, this quantity roughly remains constant. In contrast, the stellar mass density increases by $ dex in the same redshift range, where the evolution is mainly driven by quiescent galaxies, owing to an overall increase in the number of this type of galaxy. In turn, this covers the majority and most massive galaxies, namely, $60$--$100$<!PCT!> of galaxies at $ (M_