What has quenched the massive spiral galaxies?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Quenched massive spiral galaxies have attracted great attention recently, as more data are available to constrain their environment and cold gas content. However, the quenching mechanism is still uncertain, as it depends on the mass range and baryon budget of the galaxy. In this letter, we report the identification of a rare population of very massive, quenched spiral galaxies with stellar mass ≳1011 M⊙ and halo mass ≳1013 M⊙ from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at redshift z ∼ 0.1. Our CO observations using the IRAM (Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range) 30-m telescope show that these galaxies contain only a small amount of molecular gas. Similar galaxies are also seen in the state-of-the-art semi-analytical models and hydrodynamical simulations. It is found from these theoretical models that these quenched spiral galaxies harbour massive black holes, suggesting that feedback from the central black holes has quenched these spiral galaxies. This quenching mechanism seems to challenge the popular scenario of the co-evolution between massive black holes and massive bulges.