Abstract
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.
Highlights
From the catalog created, we find it to be undetected in F606W and F814W, while F125W and F160W have clear detections with a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of ∼25 and 65, respectively
Z, age of the universe t50 is found to at be t∼ha1t.0reGdsyhri.fAt, lwthhoiulegfhotrhtehseesruepseurlstsolianrc2o5Zrp o,rtahtee all previously mentioned star formation histories (SFHs) models together, using each model separately we find that the results from delayed-τ and truncated models are in agreement, while those using Simple stellar population (SSP)
For Galaxy-D, the optical and NIR colors suggest a lack of star formation based on a complete disagreement with the star-forming SFH models (Section 4.2)
Summary
Hydrodynamical simulations and semianalytical models have found it difficult to reproduce massive ( 1011 M*) quiescent galaxies (QGs) beyond z 3 (Steinhardt et al 2016; Schreiber et al 2018b; Cecchi et al 2019), while observations have been pushing the redshift boundary by detecting such systems at z ∼ 3–4 (Gobat et al 2012; Glazebrook et al 2017; Schreiber et al 2018a; D’Eugenio et al 2020a; Forrest et al 2020a, 2020b; Saracco et al 2020; Valentino et al 2020). For star formation to be suppressed in the z > 2 epoch that usually features gas-rich star-forming galaxies, there are a variety of possible channels These include merger-driven starbursts (Puglisi et al 2021), active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback (Brennan et al 2018), gas strangulation (Peng et al 2015), halo quenching (Feldmann & Mayer 2015), and morphological quenching (Martig et al 2009). Further probing the high-z QG population, including those in dense environments, will provide opportunities to investigate the earliest mechanics of quenching. With this in mind, we report the detection of an extremely red and old quiescent galaxy within a dense environment at z ∼ 3.
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