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Published July 20, 2016 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Star Formation Suppression Due to Jet Feedback in Radio Galaxies with Shocked Warm Molecular Gas

Abstract

We present Herschel observations of 22 radio galaxies, selected for the presence of shocked, warm molecular hydrogen emission. We measured and modeled spectral energy distributions in 33 bands from the ultraviolet to the far-infrared to investigate the impact of jet feedback on star formation activity. These galaxies are massive, early-type galaxies with normal gas-to-dust ratios, covering a range of optical and infrared colors. We find that the star formation rate (SFR) is suppressed by a factor of ~3–6, depending on how molecular gas mass is estimated. We suggest that this suppression is due to the shocks driven by the radio jets injecting turbulence into the interstellar medium (ISM), which also powers the luminous warm H_2 line emission. Approximately 25% of the sample shows suppression by more than a factor of 10. However, the degree of SFR suppression does not correlate with indicators of jet feedback including jet power, diffuse X-ray emission, or intensity of warm molecular H_2 emission, suggesting that while injected turbulence likely impacts star formation, the process is not purely parameterized by the amount of mechanical energy dissipated into the ISM. Radio galaxies with shocked warm molecular gas cover a wide range in SFR–stellar mass space, indicating that these galaxies are in a variety of evolutionary states, from actively star-forming and gas-rich to quiescent and gas-poor. SFR suppression appears to have the largest impact on the evolution of galaxies that are moderately gas-rich.

Additional Information

© 2016 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2015 November 16; revised 2016 April 1; accepted 2016 April 18; published 2016 July 18. We thank Mark Lacy for his advice and useful discussion with regards to the Sajina model, as well as George Helou for suggesting the extended Schmidt law as another point of analysis, and Yong Shi, Michael Brown, and Aditya Togi, whose comments improved the revised version of this paper. This work made use of the remote access computing accounts of the NASA Herschel Science Center, which were very helpful in reducing the Herschel data. L.L. and P.M.O. acknowledges support for this work provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech. Support for K.A. is provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant #HST-HF2-51352.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. This work is based in part on observations made with Herschel, a European Space Agency Cornerstone Mission with significant participation by NASA. This publication used observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/California Institute of Technology (Caltech) under a contract with NASA. Observations from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and JPL/Caltech, funded by NASA, were also used. This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)/Caltech, funded by NASA and the NSF, as well as from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (Sloan-III), whose funding has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the NSF, and the U.S. DOE Office of Science, and which is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the Sloan-III Collaboration. Finally, this publication makes use of data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, retrieved from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), part of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX09AF08G and by other grants and contracts. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) and the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) which are operated by the JPL/Caltech, under contract with the NASA, and NASA's Astrophysics Data System (ADS). We also used software provided by the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), which is a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA/GSFC and the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Facilities: Herschel - European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory, Spitzer - , WISE - , 2MASS - , Sloan - , GALEX - .

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