The Norris Survey of the Corona Borealis Supercluster: II. Galaxy Evolution with Redshift and Environment Todd A. Small1 and Wallace L.W. Sargent Palomar Observatory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 Electronic mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Donald Hamilton Max-Planck-Institut f¨ur Astronomie, K¨onigstuhl 17, Heidelberg D-69117, Germany Electronic mail:
[email protected] ABSTRACT We measure the field galaxy luminosity function (LF) as a function of color and redshift from z =0 to z =0.5 using galaxies from the Norris Survey of the Corona Borealis Supercluster. The data set consists of 603 field galaxies with m m 0 < z ≤ 0.5 and spans a wide range in apparent magnitude (14.0 ∼<r ∼< 21.5 ), although our field galaxy LF analysis is limited to 493 galaxies with r ≤ 20.0m. We use the observed g − r colors of the galaxies to compute accurate corrections to the rest BAB and r bands. We find that our local r-band LF, when normalized to counts in high galactic latitude fields, agrees well with the local LF measured in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey. Our BAB-band local LF, however, does not match the bj-band LF from the Stromlo/APM survey, having a normalization 1.6 times higher. We see compelling evidence that the BAB-band field galaxy LF evolves with redshift. The evolution is strongest for arXiv:astro-ph/9705021v1 5 May 1997 the population of star-forming galaxies with [O II] λ3727 rest-frame equivalent widths greater than 10A.˚ The population of red, quiescent galaxies shows no sign of evolution to z = 0.5.