The VIMOS VLT Deep Survey. The Assembly History of the Stellar Mass in Galaxies: from the Young to the Old Universe

Understand

We present a detailed analysis of the Galaxy Stellar Mass Function of galaxies up to z=2.5 as obtained from the VVDS.

• We estimate the stellar mass from broad-band photometry using 2 different assumptions on the galaxy star formation history and show that the addition of secondary bursts to a continuous star formation history produces systematically higher (up to 40%) stellar masses.
• At low redshift (z=0.2) we find a substantial population of low-mass galaxies (<10^9 Msun) composed by faint blue galaxies (M_I-M_K=0.3).
• In general the stellar mass function evolves slowly up to z=0.9 and more significantly above this redshift.