Evolution of intermediate redshift galaxies: physical properties and mass-metallicity relation

The first part of this dissertation presents the implementation of Bayesian statistics with galaxy surface luminosity (SL) prior probabilities to improve the ac- curacy of photometric redshifts. The addition of the SL prior probability helps break the degeneracy of spectro-photometric redshifts (SPZs) between low redshift 4000 A break galaxies and high redshift Lyman break galaxies which are mostly catas- trophic outliers. For a sample of 1138 galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts in the GOODS North and South fields at z < 1.6, the application of the surface luminosity prior reduces the fraction of galaxies with redshift deviation sigma(z) > 0.2 from 15.0% to 10.4%. The second part of this dissertation presents the study of the chemical evolution of the star-forming galaxies. The Hubble Space Telescope Probing Evolution and Reionization Spectroscopically (PEARS) grism Survey effectively selects emission line galaxies (ELGs) to mAB ~ 27. Follow-up Magellan LDSS3+IMACS spectroscopy of the HST/ACS PEARS ELGs confirms an accuracy of sigma_z = 0.006 for the HST/ACS PEARS grism redshifts. The luminosity-metallicity (L-Z) relation and the mass-metallicity (M-Z) relation of the PEARS ELGs at z ~ 0.6 are offset by ~ - 0.8 dex in metallicity for a given rest-frame B absolute magnitude and stellar mass relative to the local relations from SDSS galaxies. The offsets in both relations are ~ - 0.4 dex larger than that given by other samples at same redshifts, which are demonstrated to be due to the selection of different physical properties of the PEARS ELGs: low metallicities, very blue colors, small sizes, compact disturbed morphologies, high SSFR > 10^-9 yr^-1 , and high gas fraction. The downsizing effect, the tidal interacting induced inflow of metal-poor gas, and the SNe driven galactic winds outflows, may account for the significant offset of the PEARS galaxies in the L-Z and the M-Z relations relative to the local relations. The detection of the emission lines of ELGs down to m ~ 26 mag in the HST/ACS PEARS + HST/WCF3 ERS NIR composit grism spectra enables to extend the study of the evolution of the L-Z and M-Z relations to 0.6 < z < 2.4.