BULGE GROWTH AND QUENCHING SINCE z = 2.5 IN CANDELS/3D-HST

By P. Lang, S. Wuyts, R. Somerville, N. F. Förster Schreiber, R. Genzel, Eric F. Bell, G. Brammer, A. Dekel, S. Faber, H. Ferguson and 13 more. 2014

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Exploiting the deep high-resolution imaging of all five CANDELS fields, and accurate redshift information provided by 3D-HST, we investigate the relation between structure and stellar populations for a mass-selected sample of 6764 galaxies above 1010 M☉, spanning the redshift range 0.5 < z < 2.5. For the first time, we fit two-dimensional models comprising a single Sérsic fit and two-component (i.e., bulge + disk) decompositions not only to the H-band light distributions, but also to the stellar mass maps reconstructed from resolved stellar population modeling. We confirm that the increased bulge prominence among quiescent galaxies, as reported previously based on rest-optical observations, remains in place when considering the distributions of stellar mass. Moreover, we observe an increase of the typical Sérsic index and bulge-to-total ratio (with median B/T reaching 40%–50%) among star-forming galaxies above 1011 M☉. Given that quenching for these most massive systems is likely to be imminent, our findings suggest that significant bulge growth precedes a departure from the star-forming main sequence. We demonstrate that the bulge mass (and ideally knowledge of the bulge and total mass) is a more reliable predictor of the star-forming versus quiescent state of a galaxy than the total stellar mass. The same trends are predicted by the state-of-the-art, semi-analytic model by Somerville et al. In this model, bulges and black holes grow hand in hand through merging and/or disk instabilities, and feedback from active galactic nuclei shuts off star formation. Further observations will be required to pin down star formation quenching mechanisms, but our results imply that they must be internal to the galaxies and closely associated with bulge growth.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b344805fddf9b8ebfc943d57c63ee380b689201

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Citations in the corpus

EVIDENCE FOR WIDE-SPREAD ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS-DRIVEN OUTFLOWS IN THE MOST MASSIVE z ∼ 1–2 STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2014, methodology): “Lang et al. (2014) have demonstrated that it is possible to infer high-z bulge masses from spatially resolved SED modeling of multi-band optical and near-IR HST imagery yielding stellar mass maps, and then carrying out a two-component structural analysis.”
The dust content of galaxies from z = 0 to z = 9 (2016, methodology): “This approach selects galaxies in a similar manner to commonly used observational methods for selecting star-forming galaxies, such as color-color cuts (e.g., Lang et al. 2014).”
CONSTRAINING THE LOW-MASS SLOPE OF THE STAR FORMATION SEQUENCE AT 0.5 < z < 2.5 (2014, background): “Similarly, Lang et al. (2014) observe that the bulge to disk ratio increases by a factor of two from log(M /M ) = 10 to log(M /M ) = 11.5.”
Star formation in semi-analytic galaxy formation models with multiphase gas (2015, result): “This has been shown to produce similar results to commonly used observational methods for selecting star forming galaxies (e.g. Lang et al. 2014).”
THE KMOS3D SURVEY: DESIGN, FIRST RESULTS, AND THE EVOLUTION OF GALAXY KINEMATICS FROM 0.7 ⩽ z ⩽ 2.7 (2014, methodology): “There are indications from our data and the literature that disk galaxies at z ∼ 1 − 2 are both thick (e.g. Elmegreen & Elmegreen 2006; Genzel et al. 2011) and composite (e.g. Lang et al. 2014) thus we adopt Q = 1 as an acceptable average value.”
Constraining the properties of AGN host galaxies with spectral energy distribution modelling (2015, background): “Correlations between galaxy structural parameters, SFR and stellar mass (e.g. Kauffmann et al. 2004; Wuyts et al. 2011; Bell et al. 2012; Lang et al. 2014) suggest that the formation of galaxy bulges and the quenching of star formation are likely related to the same underlying processes.”
Structural and Star-forming Relations since z ∼ 3: Connecting Compact Star-forming and Quiescent Galaxies (2015, background): “This is consistent with SFGs having more settled, disk-like morphologies, larger sizes, and progressively denser cores (see also, Bruce et al. 2012; Lang et al. 2014; Tacchella et al. 2015).”
Evolution of density profiles in high-z galaxies: compaction and quenching inside-out (2015, background): “Several studies have investigated the stellar mass density distribution within galaxies at high redshifts (e.g., Elmegreen et al. 2009; Förster Schreiber et al. 2011; Wuyts et al. 2012; van Dokkum et al. 2013; Patel et al. 2013; Lang et al. 2014; Morishita et al. 2015).”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “Recent works have shown that the correlation between quiescence and other internal properties such as spheroid fraction, velocity dispersion, and central density is even stronger than that with stellar mass (Bell et al. 2012, Bluck et al. 2014, Cheung et al. 2012, Lang et al. 2014).”
PHIBSS: Unified Scaling Relations of Gas Depletion Time and Molecular Gas Fractions (2017, background): “It is also the location of disk galaxies in terms of structural (nSersic~1, e.g. Franx et al. 2008, Wuyts et al. 2011b, Lang et al. 2014) and kinematic (vrot/σ0>>1, e.g. Förster Schreiber et al. 2009, Wisnioski et al. 2015) properties, from z~0 to 2.5.”
The SINS/zC-SINF Survey of z ∼ 2 Galaxy Kinematics: SINFONI Adaptive Optics–assisted Data and Kiloparsec-scale Emission-line Properties (2018, background): “The stellar mass map for K20-ID7 is less centrally peaked compared to the massive disks with bright star-forming ringlike structures, which may reflect the decrease in bulge-tototal mass ratios at lower galaxy masses (e.g., Lang et al. 2014).”