Through Thick and Thin: The Cosmic Evolution of Disk Scale Height

To investigate the formation and evolution of vertical structures in disk galaxies, we measure global sech2 scale heights, averaging thin and thick components when present, for 2631 edge-on disk galaxies with M* > 1010M⊙ at 0 < z < 3.5 from the JWST COSMOS-Web survey. We show that dust extinction systematically overestimates scale heights at shorter rest-frame wavelengths and therefore adopt a fixed rest-frame wavelength of 1 μm. After further correcting for projection-induced bias using a new accurate method, we find that the median disk scale height increases from 0.56 ± 0.03 kpc at z = 3.25 to 0.84 ± 0.04 kpc at z = 1.25, and subsequently decreases to 0.67 ± 0.06 kpc at z = 0.25. The bias-corrected disk scale length-to-height ratio remains constant at 2.7 ± 0.2 for z > 1.5 but rises to 4.0 ± 0.4 at z = 0.25. These results imply that the high-redshift progenitors of present-day thick disks were of intermediate thickness, neither thin nor thick, yet dynamically hot and dense. The observed radial variation of scale height is consistent with the artificial flaring expected from observational effects, disfavoring minor mergers as the primary mechanism of disk thickening. Instead, we suggest that the high-redshift intermediate-thickness disks were single-component systems that increased their vertical scale height through decreasing surface mass density and/or violent gravitational instabilities, eventually producing thick disks. Thin-disk growth begins at z ≈ 2 and dominates at z ≲ 1, yielding a vertically more compact system with decreasing scale heights from z ≈ 1 to 0. The inferred thin-disk mass fraction increases from 0.1 ± 0.03 at z = 1 to 0.6 ± 0.1 at z = 0. Together, these findings reveal a continuous evolutionary link between high-redshift single-component disks and present-day disks comprising thick and thin components.