The first appearance of the red sequence of galaxies in proto-clusters at 2 <~ z <~ 3

By T. Kodama, I. Tanaka, M. Kajisawa, J. Kurk, B. Venemans, C. De Breuck, J. Vernet, C. Nao, Japan., Subaru Telescope and 6 more. 2007

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We explore the evolved galaxy population in the proto-clusters around four high-z radio galaxies at 2 ≤ z ≤ 3 based on wide-field near-infrared (NIR) imaging. Three of the four fields are known proto-clusters as demonstrated by overdensities of line-emitting galaxies at the same redshifts as the radio galaxies found by narrow-band surveys and spectroscopic follow-up observations. We imaged the fields of three targets (PKS 1138-262, USS 0943-242 and MRC 0316-257) to a depth of K s ∼ 22 (Vega magnitude, 5σ) over a 4 x 7 arcmin 2 area centred on the radio galaxies with a new wide-field NIR camera, Multi-Object Infra-Red Camera and Spectrograph (MOIRCS), on the Subaru Telescope. Another target (USS 1558-003) was observed with Son of ISAAC on the New technology Telescope (NTT) to a depth of K s = 20.5 (5σ) over a 5 x 5 arcmin 2 area. We apply colour cuts in J-K s and/or JHK s in order to exclusively search for galaxies located at high redshifts: z > 2. To the 5σ limiting magnitudes, we see a significant excess of NIR-selected galaxies by a factor of 2 to 3 compared to those found in the field of GOODS-South. The spatial distribution of these NIR-selected galaxies is not uniform and traces structures similar to those of emission-line galaxies, although the samples of NIR-selected galaxies and emitters show little overlap, from which we conclude that the former tend to be an evolved population with much higher stellar mass than the latter, young and active emitters. We focus on the NIR colour-magnitude sequence of the evolved population and find that the bright-end (M stars > 10 11 M ⊙ ) of the red sequence is well populated by z ∼ 2 but much less so in the z ∼ 3 proto-clusters. This may imply that the bright-end of the colour-magnitude sequence first appeared between z = 3 and 2, an era coinciding with the appearance of sub-mm galaxies and the peak of the cosmic star formation rate. Our observations show that during the same epoch, massive galaxies are forming in high-density environments by vigorous star formation and assembly.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd5c9d99516918055aac2ff5f8b598b03fc56662

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Citations in the corpus

A mature cluster with X-ray emission at z = 2.07 (2010, background): “2 (Gladders & Yee 2000, Wilson et al. 2008) and passive galaxy populations at even higher redshift (Kodama et al. 2007).”
EMU: Evolutionary Map of the Universe (2011, background): “Most clusters have been found either through X-ray surveys (Rosati et al. 1998; Romer et al. 2001; Pierre et al. 2003) or by searching for over-densities in optical colour– position space (Gladders & Yee 2005; Wilson et al. 2008; Kodama et al. 2007).”
Distant radio galaxies and their environments (2008, methodology): “…of galaxies that are exploited for such protocluster searches - the Lyman break around the 912Å Lyman continuum discontinuity (Miley et al 2004; Overzier et al 2006,; Intema et al 2006) and the 4000Å break or Balmer break close to 3648Å (Kurk et al 2004; Kajisawa et al 2006; Kodama et al 2007).”
The realm of the galaxy protoclusters (2016, background): “Doherty et al. (2010) obtained a large number of optical and near-IR spectra of red galaxies in two protoclusters that had previously been shown to have rather prominent excesses of red galaxies, including the Spiderweb (Kurk et al., 2004b; Kodama et al., 2007; Zirm et al., 2008).”
EVOLUTION OF THE COLOR–MAGNITUDE RELATION IN GALAXY CLUSTERS AT z ∼ 1 FROM THE ACS INTERMEDIATE REDSHIFT CLUSTER SURVEY (2008, background): “…to passively de-evolve our average CMR parameters measured at z ∼ 1 up to these redshifts (see Appendix II), we find a CMR zero point, slope and scatter in (J−Ks)z=2 color of 2.60 mag, 0.053 and 0.053 mag, respectively, all consistent with the results of Kodama et al. (2007) and Zirm et al. (2008).”
A SPITZER-SELECTED GALAXY CLUSTER AT z = 1.62 (2010, background): “…around distant radio galaxies require the presence of a massive central galaxy (e.g., Kurk et al. 2000; Miley et al. 2004; Stern et al. 2003; Kodama et al. 2007; Venemans et al. 2007; Zirm et al. 2008; Chiaberge et al. 2010), which may not be an intrinsic property of cluster progenitors.”
The dependence of star formation activity on environment and stellar mass at z∼ 1 from the HiZELS-Hα survey (2010, result): “Similar trends have also been suggested at z ∼ 2 by Kodama et al. (2007), and recently Hayashi et al. (2010) found that the fraction of star-forming galaxies seems to remain constant up to the highest densities in a cluster environment at z ∼ 1.5.”