TY - JOUR
T1 - Now You See It, Now You Don't
T2 - Star Formation Truncation Precedes the Loss of Molecular Gas by ∼100 Myr in Massive Poststarburst Galaxies at z ∼0.6
AU - Bezanson, Rachel
AU - Spilker, Justin S.
AU - Suess, Katherine A.
AU - Setton, David J.
AU - Feldmann, Robert
AU - Greene, Jenny E.
AU - Kriek, Mariska
AU - Narayanan, Desika
AU - Verrico, Margaret
N1 - Funding Information:
This project used data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico and the Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Fisica d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig Maximilians Universitat Munchen and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, NSF's NOIRLab, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University.
Funding Information:
R.S.B., J.E.G., D.J.S., and D.N. gratefully acknowledge support from NSF-AAG#1907697, #1907723, and #1908137. J.S.S. acknowledges support provided by NASA through NASA Hubble fellowship grant #HF2-51446 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. R.F. acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant No. PP00P2_157591, PP00P2_194814, and 200021_188552). This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA #2016.1.01126.S and ADS/JAO.ALMA #2017.1.01109.S. 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. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. K.A.S. gratefully acknowledges the UCSC Chancellors Fellowship.
Funding Information:
The Legacy Surveys imaging of the DESI footprint is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH1123, by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract; and by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract No. AST-0950945 to NOAO.
Funding Information:
The Legacy Survey team makes use of data products from the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. NEOWISE is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Funding Information:
Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III website is http://www.sdss3.org/.
Funding Information:
BASS is a key project of the Telescope Access Program (TAP), which has been funded by the National Astronomical Observatories of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Strategic Priority Research Program “The Emergence of Cosmological Structures” grant No. XDB09000000), and the Special Fund for Astronomy from the Ministry of Finance. The BASS is also supported by the External Cooperation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. 114A11KYSB20160057), and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (grant No. 11433005).
Funding Information:
This work was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant No. PHY-1607611. We also thank the North American ALMA Science Center (NAASC) for their generous funding that helped support the participation of junior scientists (including D.J.S. and K.A.S.) at the Aspen Center for Physics workshop in 2020 February. The NAASC is part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
PY - 2022/2/1
Y1 - 2022/2/1
N2 - We use ALMA observations of CO(2-1) in 13 massive (M ∗ ≳3 1011 M ⊙) poststarburst galaxies at z ∼0.6 to constrain the molecular gas content in galaxies shortly after they quench their major star-forming episode. The poststarburst galaxies in this study are selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic samples (Data Release 14) based on their spectral shapes, as part of the Studying QUenching at Intermediate-z Galaxies: Gas, angu L→ar momentum, and Evolution ( SQuIGGL→E ) program. Early results showed that two poststarburst galaxies host large H2 reservoirs despite their low inferred star formation rates (SFRs). Here we expand this analysis to a larger statistical sample of 13 galaxies. Six of the primary targets (45%) are detected, with MH2≳3109 M ⊙. Given their high stellar masses, this mass limit corresponds to an average gas fraction of «fH2MH2/M∗ »7% or ∼ 14% using lower stellar masses estimates derived from analytic, exponentially declining star formation histories. The gas fraction correlates with the D n 4000 spectral index, suggesting that the cold gas reservoirs decrease with time since burst, as found in local K+A galaxies. Star formation histories derived from flexible stellar population synthesis modeling support this empirical finding: galaxies that quenched ≳2150 Myr prior to observation host detectable CO(2-1) emission, while older poststarburst galaxies are undetected. The large H2 reservoirs and low SFRs in the sample imply that the quenching of star formation precedes the disappearance of the cold gas reservoirs. However, within the following 100-200 Myr, the SQuIGGL→E galaxies require the additional and efficient heating or removal of cold gas to bring their low SFRs in line with standard H2 scaling relations.
AB - We use ALMA observations of CO(2-1) in 13 massive (M ∗ ≳3 1011 M ⊙) poststarburst galaxies at z ∼0.6 to constrain the molecular gas content in galaxies shortly after they quench their major star-forming episode. The poststarburst galaxies in this study are selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic samples (Data Release 14) based on their spectral shapes, as part of the Studying QUenching at Intermediate-z Galaxies: Gas, angu L→ar momentum, and Evolution ( SQuIGGL→E ) program. Early results showed that two poststarburst galaxies host large H2 reservoirs despite their low inferred star formation rates (SFRs). Here we expand this analysis to a larger statistical sample of 13 galaxies. Six of the primary targets (45%) are detected, with MH2≳3109 M ⊙. Given their high stellar masses, this mass limit corresponds to an average gas fraction of «fH2MH2/M∗ »7% or ∼ 14% using lower stellar masses estimates derived from analytic, exponentially declining star formation histories. The gas fraction correlates with the D n 4000 spectral index, suggesting that the cold gas reservoirs decrease with time since burst, as found in local K+A galaxies. Star formation histories derived from flexible stellar population synthesis modeling support this empirical finding: galaxies that quenched ≳2150 Myr prior to observation host detectable CO(2-1) emission, while older poststarburst galaxies are undetected. The large H2 reservoirs and low SFRs in the sample imply that the quenching of star formation precedes the disappearance of the cold gas reservoirs. However, within the following 100-200 Myr, the SQuIGGL→E galaxies require the additional and efficient heating or removal of cold gas to bring their low SFRs in line with standard H2 scaling relations.
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/ac3dfa
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/ac3dfa
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85125739348
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 925
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 2
M1 - 153
ER -