An Ancient Massive Quiescent Galaxy Found in a Gas-rich z ∼ 3 Group

Creators: Kalita, Boris S.; Daddi, Emanuele; D'Eugenio, Chiara; Valentino, Francesco; Rich, R. Michael; Gómez-Guijarro, Carlos; Coogan, Rosemary T.; Delvecchio, Ivan; Elbaz, David; Neill, James D.; Puglisi, Annagrazia; Strazzullo, Veronica

Abstract

Deep Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and Hubble Space Telescope observations reveal the presence of a quenched massive galaxy within the z = 2.91 galaxy group RO-1001. With a mass-weighted stellar age of 1.6 ± 0.4 Gyr this galaxy is one of the oldest known at z ∼ 3, implying that most of its 10¹¹ M_⊙ of stars were rapidly formed at z > 6–8. This is a unique example of the predominantly passive evolution of a galaxy over at least 3 < z < 6 following its high-redshift quenching and a smoking-gun event pointing to the early imprint of an age–environment relation. At the same time, being in a dense group environment with extensive cold gas reservoirs as betrayed by a giant Lyα halo, the existence of this galaxy demonstrates that gas accretion shutdown is not necessary for quenching and its maintenance.

Additional Information

© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2021 June 1; revised 2021 July 13; accepted 2021 July 22; published 2021 August 16. We would like to express our gratitude to Raphael Gobat for his valuable inputs. We also thank Gabriel Brammer for assistance with the use of grizli for the HST data reduction. R.M.R. and J.D.N. acknowledge support from GO15910. V.S. acknowledges the support from the ERC-StG ClustersXCosmo grant agreement 716762. F.V. acknowledges support from the Carlsberg Foundation Research Grant CF18-0388 "Galaxies: Rise and Death" and from the Cosmic Dawn Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under then grant No. 140. A.P. gratefully acknowledges financial support from STFC through grants ST/T000244/1 and ST/P000541/1. B.S.K. would like to thank William G. Hartley (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), for providing crucial software-related files that were needed for this work. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: 2019.1.00399. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ. Software: SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996), GALFIT (Peng et al. 2002, 2010), grizli (v0.4.0; Brammer 2018), CASA (McMullin et al. 2007), HYPERZ (Bolzonella et al. 2000).

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Accepted Version - 2107.13241.pdf

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