We present a measurement of the spatial clustering of rest-frame UV-selected massive galaxies at 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 2.5 in the COSMOS/UltraVISTA field. Considering four separate redshift bins with ∆z = 0.5, we construct three galaxy populations, i.e., red sequence (RS), blue cloud (BC), and green valley (GV) galaxies, according to their rest-frame extinction-corrected UV colors. The correlation lengths of these populations are confirmed to be dependent on their rest-frame UV color and redshift: UV redder galaxies are found to be more clustered. In all redshift bins, the GV galaxies generally have medium clustering amplitudes and are hosted within dark matter halos whose masses are more or less between those of RS and BC galaxies; and the clustering amplitude of GV galaxies is close to that of AGNs in the same redshift bin, suggesting that AGN activity may be responsible for transforming galaxy colors. After carefully examining their stellar masses, we find that the clustering amplitudes of galaxy samples with different colors are all similar once they have a similar median stellar mass and that the median stellar mass alone may be a good predictor of galaxy clustering.

To investigate the lifetimes of red sequence (RS), blue cloud (BC), and green valley (GV) galaxies, we derive their lifetimes using clustering analyses at 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 2.5 in the COSMOS/UltraVISTA field. Several essentials that may influence the lifetime estimation have been explored, including the dark matter (DM) halo mass function (HMF), the width of the redshift bin, the growth of DM halos within each redshift bin, and the stellar mass. We find that the HMF difference results in scatters of ∼0.2 dex on the lifetime estimation, adopting a redshift bin width of Δz = 0.5 is good enough to estimate the lifetime, and no significant effect on lifetime estimation is found due to the growth of DM halos within each redshift bin. The galaxy subsamples with higher stellar masses generally have shorter lifetimes, but the lifetimes in different subsamples at z > 1.5 tend to be independent of stellar mass. Consistently, the clustering-based lifetime for each galaxy subsample agrees well with that inferred using the spectral energy distribution modeling. Moreover, the lifetimes of the RS and BC galaxies also coincide well with their typical gas-depletion timescales attributed to the consumption of star formation. Interestingly, the distinct lifetime behaviors of the GV galaxies at z ≤ 1.5 and z > 1.5 cannot be fully accounted for by their gas-depletion timescales. Instead, this discrepancy between the lifetimes and gas-depletion timescales of the GV galaxies suggests that there are additional physical processes, such as feedback of active galactic nuclei, which accelerates the quenching of GV galaxies at high redshifts.

The coevolution between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host galaxies has been proposed for more than a decade, albeit with little direct evidence about black hole accretion activities regulating galaxy star formation at z > 1. In this paper, we study the lifetimes of X-ray active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in UV-selected red sequence (RS), blue cloud (BC) and green valley (GV) galaxies, finding that AGN accretion activities are most prominent in GV galaxies at z ∼ 1.5–2, compared with RS and BC galaxies. We also compare AGN accretion timescales with typical color transition timescales of UV-selected galaxies. We find that the lifetime of GV galaxies at z ∼ 1.5–2 is very close to the typical timescale when the AGNs residing in them stay in the high-accretion-rate mode at these redshifts; for BC galaxies, the consistency between the color transition timescale and the black hole strong accretion lifetime is more likely to happen at lower redshifts (z < 1). Our results support the scenario where AGN accretion activities govern UV color transitions of host galaxies, making galaxies and their central SMBHs coevolve with each other.