The road to the red sequence: A detailed view of the formation of a "red and dead" massive galaxy at z~2

Details The road to the red sequence: A detailed view of the formation of a "red and dead" massive galaxy at z~2 The road to the red sequence: A detailed view of the formation of a "red and dead" massive galaxy at z~2

2011-09-28

arxiv.org/abs/1109.6323v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

10 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to MNRAS

Scientific paper

(Abridged) We present a detailed analysis of the star formation history (SFH) of FW4871, a massive "red and dead" galaxy at z=1.893+-0.002. We compare rest-frame optical and NUV slitless grism spectra from the HST with a large set of composite stellar populations to constrain the underlying star formation history. Even though the morphology features prominent tidal tails, indicative of a recent merger, there is no sign of on-going star formation, and the spectral fits give a very small amount of dust reddening. An exponentially decaying SFH gives very short timescales (\tau<0.2 Gyr) which would imply very high star formation rates during formation, of order 1400Msun/yr, but we argue that the lack of young stars in the spectrum forces this value. An alternative model assuming truncation of an otherwise constant SFH gives a formation epoch around zF~10 with a truncation after 2.7 Gyr, giving a mass-weighted age of 1.5 Gyr and a stellar mass of 0.8-3E11 Msun, implying star formation rates of 30-110 Msun/yr. The models suggest a formation process whereby cold accretion at high redshift fuelled efficient star formation, subsequently stopped either by the onset of a supernova-driven galactic wind, or by the merger that caused its present morphology. This finding would imply that major mergers themselves induce the truncation of star formation in massive galaxies, setting them on their way towards the red sequence.

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