The Compact Structures of Massive z ∼ 0.7 Post-starburst Galaxies in the 
	    SQuIGGL⃗E
	   Sample

Setton, David J.; Verrico, Margaret; Bezanson, Rachel; Greene, Jenny E.; Suess, Katherine A.; Goulding, Andy D.; Spilker, Justin; Kriek, Mariska; Feldmann, Robert; Narayanan, Desika; Hall-Hooper, Khalil; Kado-Fong, Erin

doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac6096

“…Most of the seven UVISTA rapidly quenched galaxies are more compact than normal quiescent galaxies at their respective redshifts, consistent with the results of several previous works, where they found that young quiescent galaxies (or PSBs) tend to be more compact than old (or normal) quiescent galaxies (e.g., Whitaker et al 2012a;Belli et al 2015;Almaini et al 2017;Maltby et al 2018;Wu et al 2018;Setton et al 2022). There are two exceptions: UVISTA 95964 and 133187.…”

Section: Sizessupporting

confidence: 90%

“…Several studies have also shown that these quenched galaxies after starbursts develop high central stellar mass densities (e.g., Tacchella et al 2016a;Barro et al 2017;Mosleh et al 2017). Although, recently, Setton et al (2022) have shown, based on the trend between sizes and the time since quenching, that the recent burst of poststarbursts would have taken place at larger (>1 kpc) spatial scales.…”

Section: Size Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rapid Quenching of Galaxies at Cosmic Noon

Park

¹

,

Belli

²

,

Conroy

³

et al. 2023

ApJ

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The existence of massive quiescent galaxies at high redshift seems to require rapid quenching, but it is unclear whether all quiescent galaxies have gone through this phase and what physical mechanisms are involved. To study rapid quenching, we use rest-frame colors to select 12 young quiescent galaxies at z ∼ 1.5. From spectral energy distribution fitting, we find that they all experienced intense starbursts prior to rapid quenching. We confirm this with deep Magellan/FIRE spectroscopic observations for a subset of seven galaxies. Broad emission lines are detected for two galaxies, and are most likely caused by active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity. The other five galaxies do not show any emission features, suggesting that gas has already been removed or depleted. Most of the rapidly quenched galaxies are more compact than normal quiescent galaxies, providing evidence for a central starburst in the recent past. We estimate an average transition time of 300 Myr for the rapid quenching phase. Approximately 4% of quiescent galaxies at z = 1.5 have gone through rapid quenching; this fraction increases to 23% at z = 2.2. We identify analogs in the TNG100 simulation and find that rapid quenching for these galaxies is driven by AGNs, and for half of the cases, gas-rich major mergers seem to trigger the starburst. We conclude that these young massive quiescent galaxies are not just rapidly quenched, but also rapidly formed through a major starburst. We speculate that mergers drive gas inflow toward the central regions and grow supermassive black holes, leading to rapid quenching by AGN feedback.

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“…It is therefore possible that more galaxies found in our sample have undergone a major merger but, due to the timescale on which tidal features fade and their low surface brightness, are flagged as undisturbed in this study. Our sample is universally more compact than coeval star-forming and quiescent galaxies, which is also associated with gas-rich major mergers and may be a sign that this older population is indeed composed of merger remnants (Setton et al 2022). However, the existence of 10 bright, recently quenched, yet undisturbed galaxies suggests that a recent major merging event may not be universal in our sample.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…We also remove any control images that contain a foreground object and would therefore make visual identification of the central object impossible. Note that this differs from the method used in the companion paper Setton et al (2022), in which galaxies were first matched in mass and later in redshift, resulting in a larger number of comparison galaxies. After mass and redshift matching, we are able to compare 143 poststarburst and quiescent galaxy pairs and 103 post-starburst and star-forming galaxy pairs.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Throughout this paper, we quote AB magnitudes and adopt a concordance ΛCDM cosmology with Ω Λ = 0.7, Ω m = 0.3, and H 0 = 70 km s −1 Mpc −1 . We utilize deep images of poststarburst galaxies at z ∼ 0.7 to assess the role of mergers in quenching post-starburst galaxies and to supplement our structural analysis of these galaxies in Setton et al (2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Merger Signatures are Common, but not Universal, in Massive, Recently Quenched Galaxies at z ∼ 0.7

Verrico

¹

,

Setton

²

,

Bezanson

³

et al. 2023

ApJ

Self Cite

4

1

0

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We present visual classifications of merger-induced tidal disturbances in 143 M * ∼ 1011 M ⊙ post-starburst galaxies at z ∼ 0.7 identified in the SQuIGG L ⃗ E Sample. This sample spectroscopically selects galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that have stopped their primary epoch of star formation within the past ∼500 Myr. Visual classifications are performed on Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging. We compare to a control sample of mass- and redshift-matched star-forming and quiescent galaxies from the Large Early Galaxy Census and find that post-starburst galaxies are more likely to be classified as disturbed than either category. This corresponds to a factor of 3.6 − 1.3 + 2.9 times the disturbance rate of older quiescent galaxies and 2.1 − .73 + 1.9 times the disturbance rate of star-forming galaxies. Assuming tidal features persist for ≲500 Myr, this suggests merging is coincident with quenching in a significant fraction of these post-starbursts. Galaxies with tidal disturbances are younger on average than undisturbed post-starburst galaxies in our sample, suggesting tidal features from a major merger may have faded over time. This may be exacerbated by the fact that, on average, the undisturbed subset is fainter, rendering low-surface-brightness tidal features harder to identify. However, the presence of 10 young (≲150 Myr since quenching) undisturbed galaxies suggests that major mergers are not the only fast physical mechanism that shut down the primary epoch of star formation in massive galaxies at intermediate redshift.

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Central concentration of asymmetric features in post-starburst galaxies at z ∼ 0.8

Himoto

¹

,

Kajisawa

²

2022

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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We present morphological analyses of Post-starburst galaxies (PSBs) at 0.7 < z < 0.9 in the COSMOS field. We fitted ultraviolet to mid-infrared multi-band photometry of objects with i < 24 from COSMOS2020 catalogue with population synthesis models assuming non-parametric, piece-wise constant function of star formation history, and selected 94 those galaxies that have high specific star formation rates (SSFRs) of more than 10−9.5 yr−1 in 321–1000 Myr before observation and an order of magnitude lower SSFRs within recent 321 Myr. We devised a new non-parametric morphological index which quantifies concentration of asymmetric features, CA, and measured it as well as concentration C and asymmetry A on the Hubble Space Telescope /Advanced Camera for Surveys IF814W-band images. While relatively high C and low A values of PSBs are similar with those of quiescent galaxies rather than star-forming galaxies, we found that PSBs show systematically higher values of CA than both quiescent and star-forming galaxies; 36% of PSBs have log CA > 0.8, while only 16% (2%) of quiescent (star-forming) galaxies show such high CA values. Those PSBs with high CA have relatively low overall asymmetry of A ∼ 0.1, but show remarkable asymmetric features near the centre. The fraction of those PSBs with high CA increases with increasing SSFR in 321–1000 Myr before observation rather than residual on-going star formation. These results and their high surface stellar mass densities suggest that those galaxies experienced a nuclear starburst in the recent past, and processes that cause such starbursts could lead to the quenching of star formation through rapid gas consumption, supernova/AGN feedback, and so on.

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The Compact Structures of Massive z ∼ 0.7 Post-starburst Galaxies in the SQuIGGL⃗E Sample

Abstract: We present structural measurements of 145 spectroscopically selected intermediate-redshift (z ∼ 0.7), massive (M ⋆ ∼ 1011 M ⊙) post-starburst galaxies from the SQuIGG L ⃗ … Show more

Cited by 13 publications

References 116 publications

Rapid Quenching of Galaxies at Cosmic Noon

Rapid Quenching of Galaxies at Cosmic Noon

Merger Signatures are Common, but not Universal, in Massive, Recently Quenched Galaxies at z ∼ 0.7

Central concentration of asymmetric features in post-starburst galaxies at z ∼ 0.8

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