The OTELO survey as a morphological probe. Last ten Gyr of galaxy evolution

Abstract

Context. The morphology of galaxies provide us with a unique tool for relating and understanding other physical properties and their changes over the course of cosmic time. It is only recently that we have been afforded access to a wealth of data for an unprecedented number galaxies thanks to large and deep surveys. Aims. We present the morphological catalogue of the OTELO survey galaxies detected with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)-ACS F814W images. We explore various methods applied in previous works to separate early-type (ET) and late-type (LT) galaxies classified via spectral energy distribution (SED) fittings using galaxy templates. Together with this article, we are releasing a catalogue containing the main morphological parameters in the F606W and F814W bands derived for more than 8000 sources. Methods. The morphological analysis is based on the single-Sérsic profile fit. We used the GALAPAGOS2 software to provide multi-wavelength morphological parameters fitted simultaneously in two HST-ACS bands. The GALAPAGOS2 software detects, prepares guess values for GALFIT-M, and provides the best-fitting single-Sérsic model in both bands for each source. Stellar masses were estimated using synthetic rest-frame magnitudes recovered from SED fittings of galaxy templates. The morphological catalogue is complemented with concentration indexes from a separate SExtractor dual, high dynamical range mode. Results. A total of 8812 sources were successfully fitted with single-Sérsic profiles. The analysis of a carefully selected sample of ∼3000 sources up to zphot = 2 is presented in this work, of which 873 sources were not detected in previous studies. We found no statistical evidence for the evolution of the low-mass end of mass–size relation for ET and LT since z = 2. Furthermore, we found a good agreement for the median size evolution for ET and LT galaxies, for a given stellar mass, with the data from the literature. Compared to previous works on faint field galaxies, we found similarities regarding their rest-frame colours as well as the Sérsic and concentration indices.