Abstract
Abstract To investigate the lifetimes of red sequence (RS), blue cloud (BC), and green valley (GV) galaxies, we derive their lifetimes using clustering analyses at 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 2.5 in the COSMOS/UltraVISTA field. Several essentials that may influence the lifetime estimation have been explored, including the dark matter (DM) halo mass function (HMF), the width of the redshift bin, the growth of DM halos within each redshift bin, and the stellar mass. We find that the HMF difference results in scatters of ∼0.2 dex on the lifetime estimation, adopting a redshift bin width of Δz = 0.5 is good enough to estimate the lifetime, and no significant effect on lifetime estimation is found due to the growth of DM halos within each redshift bin. The galaxy subsamples with higher stellar masses generally have shorter lifetimes, but the lifetimes in different subsamples at z > 1.5 tend to be independent of stellar mass. Consistently, the clustering-based lifetime for each galaxy subsample agrees well with that inferred using the spectral energy distribution modeling. Moreover, the lifetimes of the RS and BC galaxies also coincide well with their typical gas-depletion timescales attributed to the consumption of star formation. Interestingly, the distinct lifetime behaviors of the GV galaxies at z ≤ 1.5 and z > 1.5 cannot be fully accounted for by their gas-depletion timescales. Instead, this discrepancy between the lifetimes and gas-depletion timescales of the GV galaxies suggests that there are additional physical processes, such as feedback of active galactic nuclei, which accelerates the quenching of GV galaxies at high redshifts.
Highlights
We present an estimation of lifetimes of massive galaxies with distinct UV colors at 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 2.5 in the COSMOS/UltraVISTA field
We estimate the lifetimes of UV-selected galaxies in the COSMOS/UltraVISTA field at 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 2.5
We first separate the red sequence (RS), blue cloud (BC), and green valley (GV) galaxies according to the color-separation criteria proposed by Wang et al (2017)
Summary
We present an estimation of lifetimes of massive galaxies with distinct UV colors at 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 2.5 in the COSMOS/UltraVISTA field. Apart from the galaxy colors (e.g., Bell et al 2004; Baldry et al 2004; Borch et al 2006; Xue et al 2010; Salim 2014; Lee et al 2015; Wang et al 2017), there are other indicators characterizing the star-formation nature of galaxies, e.g., the morphology (Strateva et al 2001; Pan et al 2013; Barro et al 2013, 2014) and some spectral features such as the Balmer absorption line (e.g., Kuntschner et al 2002; Kim et al 2013; Kim & Yoon 2017) and the 4000 ̊A break (e.g., Kauffmann et al 2003; Lambas et al 2012; Rowlands et al 2018; Angthopo et al 2019) Using these indicators, a number of studies have found that the color or SFR transition of galaxies is associated with the consumption of their gas content (e.g., Keres et al 2005; Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Kruijssen 2015; Nelson et al 2018). This method has been applied to estimate the duty cycle of highredshift AGNs (e.g., Martini & Weinberg 2001; Haiman & Hui 2001; Eftekharzadeh et al 2015; He et al 2017)
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