Lyman break and UV-selected galaxies at $z \sim 1$ I. Stellar
  populations from ALHAMBRA survey
  We take advantage of the exceptional photometric coverage provided by the
combination of GALEX data in the UV and the ALHAMBRA survey in the optical and
near-IR to analyze the physical properties of a sample of 1225 GALEX-selected
Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at $0.8 \lesssim z \lesssim 1.2$ located in the
COSMOS field. This is the largest sample of LBGs studied at that redshift range
so far. According to a spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting with
synthetic stellar population templates, we find that LBGs at $z \sim 1$ are
mostly young galaxies with a median age of 341 Myr and have intermediate dust
attenuation, $\ < E_s (B-V) \ > \sim 0.20$. Due to their selection criterion,
LBGs at $z \sim 1$ are UV-bright galaxies and have high dust-corrected total
SFR, with a median value of 16.9 $M_\odot {\rm yr}^{-1}$. Their median stellar
mass is $\log{\left(M_*/M_\odot \right)} = 9.74$. We obtain that the
dust-corrected total SFR of LBGs increases with stellar mass and the specific
SFR is lower for more massive galaxies. Only 2% of the galaxies selected
through the Lyman break criterion have an AGN nature. LBGs at $z \sim 1$ are
mostly located over the blue cloud of the color-magnitude diagram of galaxies
at their redshift, with only the oldest and/or the dustiest deviating towards
the green valley and red sequence. Morphologically, 69% of LBGs are disk-like
galaxies, with the fraction of interacting, compact, or irregular systems being
much lower, below 12%. LBGs have a median effective radius of 2.5 kpc and
bigger galaxies have higher total SFR and stellar mass. Comparing to their
high-redshift analogues, we find evidence that LBGs at lower redshifts are
bigger, redder in the UV continuum, and have a major presence of older stellar
populations in their SEDs. However, we do not find significant difference in
the distributions of stellar mass or dust attenuation.
