No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2023
Pristine gas accretion is expected to be the main driver of sustained star formation in galaxies. We measure the required amount of accreted gas at each moment over a galaxy’s history to produce the observed metallicity at that time given its star-forming history. More massive galaxies tend to have higher accretion rates and a larger drop of the accretion rate towards the present time. Within the same mass bin galaxies that are currently star-forming or in the Green Valley have similar, sustained, accretion histories while retired galaxies had a steep decline in the past. Plotting the T80 of the individual accretion histories, a measure of how sustained they are, versus the stellar mass and current sSFR we see a distribution such that currently star-forming galaxies have sustained or recent accretion and retired galaxies have declined accretion histories.