The Herschel view of the dominant mode of galaxy growth from z=4 to the present day

Understand

We present an analysis of the deepest Herschel images in four major extragalactic fields GOODS-North, GOODS-South, UDS and COSMOS obtained within the GOODS-Herschel and CANDELS-Herschel key programs.

• The picture provided by 10497 individual far-infrared detections is supplemented by the stacking analysis of a mass-complete sample of 62361 star-forming galaxies from the CANDELS-HST H band-selected catalogs and from two deep ground-based Ks band-selected catalogs in the GOODS-North and the COSMOS-wide fields, in order to obtain one of the most accurate and unbiased understanding to date of the stellar mass growth over the cosmic history.
• We show, for the first time, that stacking also provides a powerful tool to determine the dispersion of a physical correlation and describe our method called "scatter stacking" that may be easily generalized to other experiments.
• We demonstrate that galaxies of all masses from z=4 to 0 follow a universal scaling law, the so-called main sequence of star-forming galaxies.