Paulino-Afonso, Ana and Sobral, David and Buitrago, Fernando and Afonso, Jose (2017) The structural and size evolution of star-forming galaxies over the last 11 Gyrs. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 465 (3). pp. 2717-2733. ISSN 0035-8711
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Abstract
We present new results on the evolution of rest-frame blue/UV sizes and Sersic indices of H$\alpha$-selected star-forming galaxies over the last 11 Gyrs. We investigate how the perceived evolution can be affected by a range of biases and systematics such as cosmological dimming and resolution effects. We use GALFIT and an artificial redshifting technique, which includes the luminosity evolution of H$\alpha$-selected galaxies, to quantify the change on the measured structural parameters with redshift. We find typical sizes of 2 to 3 kpc and Sersic indices of n~1.2, close to pure exponential disks all the way from z=2.23 to z=0.4. At z=0 we find typical sizes of 4-5 kpc. Our results show that, when using GALFIT, cosmological dimming has a negligible impact on the derived effective radius for galaxies with n