MOIRCS Deep Survey V: A Universal Relation for Stellar Mass and Surface
  Brightness of Galaxies
  We present a universal linear correlation between the stellar mass and
surface brightness (SB) of galaxies at 0.3<z<3, using a deep K-band selected
catalog in the GOODS-North region. The correlation has a nearly constant slope,
independent of redshift and color of galaxies in the rest-z frame. Considering
unresolved compact galaxies, the tight correlation gives a lower boundary of SB
for a given stellar mass; lower SB galaxies are prohibited over the boundary.
The universal slope suggests that the stellar mass in galaxies was build up
over their cosmic histories in a similar manner irrelevant to galaxy mass, as
oppose to the scenario that massive galaxies mainly accumulated their stellar
mass by major merging. In contrast, SB shows a strong dependence on redshift
for a given stellar mass. It evolves as (1+z)^(-2.0~-0.8), in addition to
dimming as (1+z)^4 by the cosmological expansion effect. The brightening
depends on galaxy color and stellar mass. The blue population (rest-frame
U-V<0), which is dominated by young and star-forming galaxies, evolves as
~(1+z)^(-0.8 +-0.3) in the rest-V band. On the other hand, the red population
(U-V>0) and the massive galaxies (M_*>10^(10)M_sun) shows stronger brightening,
(1+z)^(-1.5+-0.1). Based on the comparison with galaxy evolution models, we
find that the phenomena are well explained by the pure luminosity evolution of
galaxies out to z~3.
