(Abridged) In a recent work we explored the dependence of galaxy stellar population properties derived from broad-band spectral energy distribution fitting on the fitting parameters, e.g. SFHs, age grid, metallicity, IMF, dust reddening, reddening la
w, filter setup and wavelength coverage. In this paper we consider also redshift as a free parameter in the fit and study whether one can obtain reasonable estimates of photometric redshifts and stellar population properties at once. We use mock star-forming as well as passive galaxies placed at various redshifts (0.5 to 3) as test particles. Mock star-forming galaxies are extracted from a semi-analytical galaxy formation model. We show that for high-z star-forming galaxies photometric redshifts, stellar masses and reddening can be determined simultaneously when using a broad wavelength coverage and a wide template setup in the fit. Masses are similarly well recovered (median ~ 0.2 dex) as at fixed redshift. For old galaxies with little recent star formation masses are better recovered than in the fixed redshift case, such that the median recovered stellar mass improves by up to 0.3 dex whereas the uncertainty in the redshift accuracy increases by only ~ 0.05. However, a failure in redshift recovery also means a failure in mass recovery. As at fixed redshift mismatches in SFH and degeneracies between age, dust and now also redshift cause underestimated ages, overestimated reddening and underestimated masses. Stellar masses are best determined at low redshift without reddening in the fit (median underestimation ~ 0.1 dex for similarly well recovered redshifts). Not surprisingly, the recovery of properties is substantially better for passive galaxies. In all cases, the recovery of physical parameters is crucially dependent on the wavelength coverage adopted in the fitting. Scaling relations for the transformation of stellar masses are provided.
We calculate stellar masses for massive luminous galaxies at redshift 0.2-0.7 using the first two years of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Stellar masses are obtained by fitting model spectral energy distributions to u,g
,r,i,z magnitudes, and simulations with mock galaxies are used to understand how well the templates recover the stellar mass. Accurate BOSS spectroscopic redshifts are used to constrain the fits. We find that the distribution of stellar masses in BOSS is narrow (Delta log M~0.5 dex) and peaks at about logM ~ 11.3 (for a Kroupa initial stellar mass function), and that the mass sampling is uniform over the redshift range 0.2 to 0.6, in agreement with the intended BOSS target selection. The galaxy masses probed by BOSS extend over ~10^{12} M, providing unprecedented measurements of the high-mass end of the galaxy mass function. We find that the galaxy number density above ~ 2.5 10^{11} M agrees with previous determinations. We perform a comparison with semi-analytic galaxy formation models tailored to the BOSS target selection and volume, in order to contain incompleteness. The abundance of massive galaxies in the models compare fairly well with the BOSS data, but the models lack galaxies at the massive end. Moreover, no evolution with redshift is detected from ~0.6 to 0.4 in the data, whereas the abundance of massive galaxies in the models increases to redshift zero. Additionally, BOSS data display colour-magnitude (mass) relations similar to those found in the local Universe, where the most massive galaxies are the reddest. On the other hand, the model colours do not display a dependence on stellar mass, span a narrower range and are typically bluer than the observations. We argue that the lack of a colour-mass relation for massive galaxies in the models is mostly due to metallicity, which is too low in the models.
