Back to Search
Start Over
ALMA 1.1 mm Observations of a Conservative Sample of High-redshift Massive Quiescent Galaxies in SHELA
- Source :
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol 951, Iss 1, p 49 (2023)
- Publication Year :
- 2023
- Publisher :
- IOP Publishing, 2023.
-
Abstract
- We present a sample of 30 massive (log( M _* / M _⊙ ) > 11) z = 3–5 quiescent galaxies selected from the Spitzer-HETDEX Exploratory Large Area (SHELA) Survey and observed at 1.1 mm with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Band 6 observations. These ALMA observations would detect even modest levels of dust-obscured star formation, on the order of ∼20 M _⊙ yr ^−1 at z ∼ 4 at the 1 σ level, allowing us to quantify the amount of contamination from dusty star-forming sources in our quiescent sample. Starting with a parent sample of candidate massive quiescent galaxies from the Stevans et al. v1 SHELA catalog, we use the Bayesian B agpipes spectral energy distribution fitting code to derive robust stellar masses ( M _* ) and star formation rates (SFRs) for these sources, and select a conservative sample of 36 candidate massive ( M _* > 10 ^11 M _⊙ ) quiescent galaxies, with specific SFRs >2 σ below the Salmon et al. star-forming main sequence at z ∼ 4. Based on the ALMA imaging, six of these candidate quiescent galaxies show the presence of significant dust-obscured star formation, and thus were removed from our final sample. This implies a ∼17% contamination rate from dusty star-forming galaxies with our selection criteria using the v1 SHELA catalog. This conservatively selected quiescent galaxy sample at z = 3–5 will provide excellent targets for future observations to constrain better how massive galaxies can both grow and shut down their star formation in a relatively short period.
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 15384357
- Volume :
- 951
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Journal :
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- edsdoj.419cb8111b4d89ac36b4f5b2102f7a
- Document Type :
- article
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/acd1e3