K-CLASH: spatially resolving star-forming galaxies in field and cluster environments at z ≍ 0.2–0.6

Tiley, Alfred L. and Vaughan, Sam P. and Stott, John P. and Davies, Roger L. and Prichard, Laura J. and Bunker, Andrew and Bureau, Martin and Cappellari, Michele and Jarvis, Matt and Robotham, Aaron and Cortese, Luca and Bellstedt, Sabine and Ansarinejad, Behzad (2020) K-CLASH: spatially resolving star-forming galaxies in field and cluster environments at z ≍ 0.2–0.6. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 496 (1). pp. 649-675. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

We present the KMOS-CLASH (K-CLASH) survey, a K-band Multi-Object Spectrograph (KMOS) survey, of the spatially resolved gas properties and kinematics of 191 (pre-dominantly blue) H α-detected galaxies at 0.2 ≲ z ≲ 0.6 in field and cluster environments. K-CLASH targets galaxies in four Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) fields in the KMOS IZ-band, over 7 arcmin radius (≍2–3 Mpc) fields of view. K-CLASH aims to study the transition of star-forming galaxies from turbulent, highly star-forming disc-like and peculiar systems at z ≍ 1–3, to the comparatively quiescent, ordered late-type galaxies at z ≍ 0, and to examine the role of clusters in the build-up of the red sequence since z ≍ 1. In this paper, we describe the K-CLASH survey, present the sample, and provide an overview of the K-CLASH galaxy properties. We demonstrate that our sample comprises star-forming galaxies typical of their stellar masses and epochs, residing both in field and cluster environments. We conclude K-CLASH provides an ideal sample to bridge the gap between existing large integral-field spectroscopy surveys at higher and lower redshifts. We find that star-forming K-CLASH cluster galaxies at intermediate redshifts have systematically lower stellar masses than their star-forming counterparts in the field, hinting at possible 'downsizing' scenarios of galaxy growth in clusters at these epochs. We measure no difference between the star formation rates of H α-detected, star-forming galaxies in either environment after accounting for stellar mass, suggesting that cluster quenching occurs very rapidly during the epochs probed by K-CLASH, or that star-forming K-CLASH galaxies in clusters have only recently arrived there, with insufficient time elapsed for quenching to have occurred.