SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES AS PROGENITORS OF COMPACT QUIESCENT GALAXIES

By S. Toft, V. Smolčić, B. Magnelli, A. Karim, Andrew Zirm, M. Michałowski, P. Capak, K. Sheth, Kevin Schawinski, J. Krogager and 9 more. 2014

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Three billion years after the big bang (at redshift z = 2), half of the most massive galaxies were already old, quiescent systems with little to no residual star formation and extremely compact with stellar mass densities at least an order of magnitude larger than in low-redshift ellipticals, their descendants. Little is known about how they formed, but their evolved, dense stellar populations suggest formation within intense, compact starbursts 1–2 Gyr earlier (at 3 < z < 6). Simulations show that gas-rich major mergers can give rise to such starbursts, which produce dense remnants. Submillimeter-selected galaxies (SMGs) are prime examples of intense, gas-rich starbursts. With a new, representative spectroscopic sample of compact, quiescent galaxies at z = 2 and a statistically well-understood sample of SMGs, we show that z = 3–6 SMGs are consistent with being the progenitors of z = 2 quiescent galaxies, matching their formation redshifts and their distributions of sizes, stellar masses, and internal velocities. Assuming an evolutionary connection, their space densities also match if the mean duty cycle of SMG starbursts is Myr (consistent with independent estimates), which indicates that the bulk of stars in these massive galaxies were formed in a major, early surge of star formation. These results suggest a coherent picture of the formation history of the most massive galaxies in the universe, from their initial burst of violent star formation through their appearance as high stellar-density galaxy cores and to their ultimate fate as giant ellipticals.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37d877cbda366d022e25ec4c2d80f30fd6b35f8a

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Citations in the corpus

An ALMA survey of the SCUBA-2 CLS UDS field: physical properties of 707 sub-millimetre galaxies (2019, background): “This connection has been strengthened by recent observations in the rest-frame far-infrared that suggest very compact extents of the star-forming regions (Toft et al. 2014; Ikarashi et al. 2015; Simpson et al. 2015a; Gullberg et al. 2019).”
ISM MASSES AND THE STAR FORMATION LAW AT Z = 1 TO 6: ALMA OBSERVATIONS OF DUST CONTINUUM IN 145 GALAXIES IN THE COSMOS SURVEY FIELD (2015, background): “The gas masses of these systems reach 4×1011 M – they are very likely the progenitors of the present epoch massive elliptical galaxies (Toft et al. 2014).”
Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time (2014, background): “This is information that can only be extracted from observations in a statistical sense, for example by using a constant number density, but even that is a difficult task whose reliability is not guaranteed (Behroozi et al. 2013c; Leja et al. 2013; Toft et al. 2014).”
Evolution of the dust emission of massive galaxies up to z=4 and constraints on their dominant mode of star formation (2014, background): “These high-redshift starbursts are probably progenitors of current, massive, elliptical galaxies (e.g., Toft et al. 2014).”
3D-HST+CANDELS: THE EVOLUTION OF THE GALAXY SIZE–MASS DISTRIBUTION SINCE z = 3 (2014, unknown): “The star-forming progenitors of the small early-type galaxies are now looked for and plausibly identiﬁed (e.g., Whitaker et al. 2011; Barro et al. 2013,?; Toft et al. 2014), but the evolutionary path of the transitioning galaxies has not been fully mapped out.”
The star formation main sequence and stellar mass assembly of galaxies in the Illustris simulation (2014, background): “They are likely the descendants of starbursts after their intense star formation has been quenched by feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN; e.g. Sanders et al. 1988; Toft et al. 2014; Cemile Marsan et al. 2014) or other processes.”
FORMING COMPACT MASSIVE GALAXIES (2015, background): “These extreme galaxies are plausible ancestors of early-type galaxies; as an example, Tacconi et al. (2008), Toft et al. (2014), and Simpson et al. (2015) have suggested that many submm galaxies could be direct progenitors of compact quiescent galaxies atz∼ 2.”
THE SCUBA-2 COSMOLOGY LEGACY SURVEY: ALMA RESOLVES THE REST-FRAME FAR-INFRARED EMISSION OF SUB-MILLIMETER GALAXIES (2014, background): “…that SMGs may be the progenitors of both these high-redshift quiescent galaxies, and local elliptical galaxies (Lilly et al. 1999; Genzel et al. 2003; Blain et al. 2004; Swinbank et al. 2006; Tacconi et al. 2008; Hainline et al. 2011; Hickox et al. 2012; Toft et al. 2014; Simpson et al. 2014).”
The formation of massive, compact galaxies at z = 2 in the Illustris simulation (2014, background): “Even at the time of peak star formation, this galaxy would be heavily dust-obscured and so may appear as a sub-millimeter galaxy, another class of c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 galaxies that have been suggested as possible progenitors for the compact population (Toft et al. 2014).”