The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: The Cosmic Spectrum and Star-Formation History

We study the evolution of 82302 star-forming (SF) galaxies from the SDSS. Our main goals are to explore new ways of handling star formation histories (SFH) obtained with our publicly available spectral synthesis code STARLIGHT, and apply them to investigate how SFHs vary as a function of nebular metallicity (Zneb). Our main results are: (1) A conventional correlation analysis shows how global properties such as luminosity, mass, dust content, mean stellar metallicity and mean...

We present the evolution of the rest-frame optical luminosity density, of the integrated rest-frame optical color, and of the stellar mass density for a sample of Ks-band selected galaxies in the HDF-S. We derived the luminosity density in the rest-frame U, B, and V-bands and found that the luminosity density increases by a factor of 1.9+-0.4, 2.9+-0.6, and 4.9+-1.0 in the V, B, and U rest-frame bands respectively between a redshift of 0.1 and 3.2. We derived the luminosity w...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) first data release provides a database of 106000 unique galaxies in the main galaxy sample with measured spectra. A sample of star-forming (SF) galaxies are identified from among the 3079 of these having 1.4 GHz luminosities from FIRST, by using optical spectral diagnostics. Using 1.4 GHz luminosities as a reference star formation rate (SFR) estimator insensitive to obscuration effects, the SFRs derived from the measured SDSS Halpha, [OII] ...

In galaxies with significant ongoing star formation there is an impressively tight correlation between total infrared luminosity (L$_{TIR}$) and H$\alpha$ luminosity (L$_{H\alpha}$), when H$\alpha$ is properly corrected for stellar absorption and dust attenuation. This long-standing result gives confidence that both measurements provide accurate estimates of a galaxy's star formation rate (SFR), despite their differing origins. To test the extent to which this holds in galaxi...

Surveys of redshifted emission lines in the near-infrared will provide unique information on the cosmic star formation history. Near-infrared Halpha surveys will probe the cosmic star formation density and the evolution of the luminosity function of star forming galaxies out to z\sim2.5, including the important z=1.5-2.0 epoch, where according to current knowledge the cosmic star formation density peaks. Halpha and other hydrogen recombination lines (except Lyman alpha) and [...

We present the first results of an ongoing spectroscopic survey of galaxies selected in the rest-frame ultraviolet (UV). The redshift distribution extends over 0<z<0.5 and a high fraction of the sources show intense nebular emission lines and UV-optical colours bluer than normal Hubble sequence galaxies. Although our sample is currently small, we derive a rest-frame UV luminosity function with a steep faint end slope consistent with that found for late-type galaxies in optica...

We explore the evolution of the specific star formation rate (SSFR) for 3.6um-selected galaxies of different M_* in the COSMOS field. The average SFR for sub-sets of these galaxies is estimated with stacked 1.4GHz radio continuum emission. We separately consider the total sample and a subset of galaxies (SF) that shows evidence for substantive recent star formation in the rest-frame optical SED. At 0.2<z<3 both populations show a strong and M_*-independent decrease in their S...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is making a multi-colour, three dimensional map of the nearby Universe. The survey is in two parts. The first part is imaging one quarter of the sky in five colours from the near ultraviolet to the near infrared. In this imaging survey we expect to detect around 50 million galaxies to a magnitude limit g ~ 23. The second part of the survey, taking place concurrently with the imaging, is obtaining spectra for up to 1 million galaxies and 100...

I review the constraints imposed by the observed extragalactic background light (EBL) on the history of the stellar birthrate in galaxies. At faint magnitudes, the logarithmic slope of the galaxy counts is flatter than 0.4 in all seven UBVIJHK optical bandpasses of the Hubble Deep Field-South imaging survey. The integration of the number counts provides a lower limit to the surface brightness of the optical extragalactic sky of 15 nW/m2/sr, comparable to the intensity of the ...

The total extragalactic background radiation can be an important test of the global star formation history (SFH). Using direct observational estimates of the SFH, along with standard assumptions about the initial mass function (IMF), we calculate the total extragalactic background radiation and the observed stellar density today. We show that plausible SFHs allow a significant range in each quantity, but that their ratio is very tightly constrained. Current estimates of the s...