Pathways to quiescence: SHARDS view on the star formation histories of massive quiescent galaxies at 1.0 < z < 1.5
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2016
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Wiley
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Abstract
We present star formation histories (SFHs) for a sample of 104 massive (stellar mass M > 10^10 M_⊙) quiescent galaxies (MQGs) at z = 1.0–1.5 from the analysis of spectrophotometric data from the Survey for High-z Absorption Red and Dead Sources (SHARDS) and HST/WFC3 G102 and G141 surveys of the GOODS-North field, jointly with broad-band observations from ultraviolet (UV) to far-infrared (far-IR). The sample is constructed on the basis of rest-frame UVJ colours and specific star formation rates (sSFRs = SFR/Mass). The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of each galaxy are compared to models assuming a delayed exponentially declining SFH. A Monte Carlo algorithm characterizes the degeneracies, which we are able to break taking advantage of the SHARDS data resolution, by measuring indices such as MgUV and D4000. The population of MQGs shows a duality in their properties. The sample is dominated (85 per cent) by galaxies with young mass-weighted ages, t_M t_M < 2 Gyr, short star formation time-scales, 〈τ〉 ∼ 60–200 Myr, and masses log(M/M_⊙) ∼ 10.5. There is an older population (15 per cent) with t_M t_M = 2–4 Gyr, longer star formation time-scales, 〈τ〉∼ 400 Myr, and larger masses, log(M/M_⊙) ∼ 10.7. The SFHs of our MQGs are consistent with the slope and the location of the main sequence of star-forming galaxies at z > 1.0, when our galaxies were 0.5–1.0 Gyr old. According to these SFHs, all the MQGs experienced a luminous infrared galaxy phase that lasts for ∼500 Myr, and half of them an ultraluminous infrared galaxy phase for ∼100 Myr. We find that the MQG population is almost assembled at z ∼ 1, and continues evolving passively with few additions to the population.
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Artículo firmado por 15 autores. © 2016 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The authors would like to thank the anonymous referee for the careful reading and useful suggestions which helped to improve the manuscript. We acknowledge support from the Spanish Programa Nacional de Astronomiía y Astrofísica under grants AYA2012-31277. NCL acknowledges financial support from AYA2013-46724-P. AAH and AHC acknowledge support from the Spanish Programa Nacional de Astronomía y Astrofísica under grant AYA2012-31447, which is partly funded by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional programme. The work of AC is supported by the STARFORM Sinergia Project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. SC acknowledges support from the ERC via an Advanced Grant under grant agreement no. 321323-NEOGAL. DC thanks AYA2012-32295. GB acknowledges support for this work from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), through grant PAPIIT IG100115. HDS thanks Giovanni Zamorani for useful discussion. This work has made use of the Rainbow Cosmological Surveys Database, which is operated by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) partnered with the University of California Observatories at Santa Cruz (UCO/Lick, UCSC). Based on observations made with the GTC installed at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, in the island of La Palma. We thank all the GTC Staff for their support and enthusiasm with the SHARDS project.