TY - JOUR
T1 - SQuIGG L-E
T2 - Studying Quenching in Intermediate-z Galaxies-Gas, Angu L-ar Momentum, and Evolution
AU - Suess, Katherine A.
AU - Kriek, Mariska
AU - Bezanson, Rachel
AU - Greene, Jenny E.
AU - Setton, David
AU - Spilker, Justin S.
AU - Feldmann, Robert
AU - Goulding, Andy D.
AU - Johnson, Benjamin D.
AU - Leja, Joel
AU - Narayanan, Desika
AU - Hall-Hooper, Khalil
AU - Hunt, Qiana
AU - Lower, Sidney
AU - Verrico, Margaret
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the anonymous referee for a constructive report which improved the quality of this manuscript. K.A.S. thanks Dustin Lang for kindly providing unWISE fluxes for the catalog. R.S.B., J.E.G., D.S., and D.N. gratefully acknowledge support from NSF-AAG#1907697. This work was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611. K.A.S. is partially supported by the UCSC Chancellor’s Fellowship. This publication makes use of data products from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as well as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 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/ . SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, Harvard University, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
PY - 2022/2/1
Y1 - 2022/2/1
N2 - We describe the Studying Quenching in Intermediate-z Galaxies: Gas, anguL→ar momentum, and Evolution (SQuIGGL-E) survey of intermediate-redshift post-starburst galaxies. We leverage the large sky coverage of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to select ∼1300 recently quenched galaxies at 0.5 < z ≤ 0.9 based on their unique spectral shapes. These bright, intermediate-redshift galaxies are ideal laboratories to study the physics responsible for the rapid quenching of star formation: they are distant enough to be useful analogs for high-redshift quenching galaxies, but low enough redshift that multiwavelength follow-up observations are feasible with modest telescope investments. We use the Prospector code to infer the stellar population properties and nonparametric star formation histories (SFHs) of all galaxies in the sample. We find that SQuIGGL-E galaxies are both very massive (M ∗ ∼1011.25 M) and quenched, with inferred star formation rates 21 Myr-1, more than an order of magnitude below the star-forming main sequence. The best-fit SFHs confirm that these galaxies recently quenched a major burst of star formation: >75% of SQuIGGL-E galaxies formed at least a quarter of their total stellar mass in the recent burst, which ended just ∼200 Myr before observation. We find that SQuIGGL-E galaxies are on average younger and more burst-dominated than most other z 2 1 post-starburst galaxy samples. This large sample of bright post-starburst galaxies at intermediate redshift opens a wide range of studies into the quenching process. In particular, the full SQuIGGL-E survey will investigate the molecular gas reservoirs, morphologies, kinematics, resolved stellar populations, active galactic nucleus incidence, and infrared properties of this unique sample of galaxies in order to place definitive constraints on the quenching process.
AB - We describe the Studying Quenching in Intermediate-z Galaxies: Gas, anguL→ar momentum, and Evolution (SQuIGGL-E) survey of intermediate-redshift post-starburst galaxies. We leverage the large sky coverage of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to select ∼1300 recently quenched galaxies at 0.5 < z ≤ 0.9 based on their unique spectral shapes. These bright, intermediate-redshift galaxies are ideal laboratories to study the physics responsible for the rapid quenching of star formation: they are distant enough to be useful analogs for high-redshift quenching galaxies, but low enough redshift that multiwavelength follow-up observations are feasible with modest telescope investments. We use the Prospector code to infer the stellar population properties and nonparametric star formation histories (SFHs) of all galaxies in the sample. We find that SQuIGGL-E galaxies are both very massive (M ∗ ∼1011.25 M) and quenched, with inferred star formation rates 21 Myr-1, more than an order of magnitude below the star-forming main sequence. The best-fit SFHs confirm that these galaxies recently quenched a major burst of star formation: >75% of SQuIGGL-E galaxies formed at least a quarter of their total stellar mass in the recent burst, which ended just ∼200 Myr before observation. We find that SQuIGGL-E galaxies are on average younger and more burst-dominated than most other z 2 1 post-starburst galaxy samples. This large sample of bright post-starburst galaxies at intermediate redshift opens a wide range of studies into the quenching process. In particular, the full SQuIGGL-E survey will investigate the molecular gas reservoirs, morphologies, kinematics, resolved stellar populations, active galactic nucleus incidence, and infrared properties of this unique sample of galaxies in order to place definitive constraints on the quenching process.
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/ac404a
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/ac404a
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85125731321
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 926
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 1
M1 - 89
ER -