CaltechAUTHORS
Published June 20, 2016 | Version Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

The role of quenching time in the evolution of the mass-size relation of passive galaxies from the WISP survey

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of Minnesota
  • 2. ROR icon University of Padua
  • 3. ROR icon CEA Saclay
  • 4. ROR icon Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova
  • 5. ROR icon Tufts University
  • 6. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 7. ROR icon University of Oxford
  • 8. ROR icon Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe
  • 9. ROR icon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
  • 10. ROR icon Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • 11. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 12. ROR icon University of California, Los Angeles
  • 13. ROR icon University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 14. ROR icon University of California, Riverside

Abstract

We analyze how passive galaxies at z ~ 1.5 populate the mass–size plane as a function of their stellar age, to understand if the observed size growth with time can be explained with the appearance of larger quenched galaxies at lower redshift. We use a sample of 32 passive galaxies extracted from the Wide Field Camera 3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel (WISP) survey with spectroscopic redshift 1.3 ≾ z ≾ 2.05, specific star formation rates lower than 0.01 Gyr^(−1), and stellar masses above 4.5 × 10^(10) M_⊙. All galaxies have spectrally determined stellar ages from fitting of their rest-frame optical spectra and photometry with stellar population models. When dividing our sample into young (age ≤2.1 Gyr) and old (age >2.1 Gyr) galaxies we do not find a significant trend in the distributions of the difference between the observed radius and that predicted by the mass–size relation. This result indicates that the relation between the galaxy age and its distance from the mass–size relation, if it exists, is rather shallow, with a slope α ≳ −0.6. At face value, this finding suggests that multiple dry and/or wet minor mergers, rather than the appearance of newly quenched galaxies, are mainly responsible for the observed time evolution of the mass–size relation in passive galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2016 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2015 April 28; accepted 2016 March 31; published 2016 June 14. Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. We thank the referee for constructive comments that improved the analysis of the results. We thank Francesco Valentino, Emeric Le Floc'h, and Emanuele Daddi for useful discussions. E.M.C. and E.D.B. are supported by Padua University through grants 60A02-5857/13, 60A02-5833/14, 60A02-4434/15, and CPDA133894.

Attached Files

Published - apj_824_2_68.pdf

Submitted - 1604.00034v1.pdf

Files

1604.00034v1.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
70385
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20160916-085316363

Related works

Describes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00034 (URL)

Funding

Padua University
60A02-5857/13
Padua University
60A02-5833/14
Padua University
60A02-4434/15
Padua University
CPDA133894

Dates

Created
2016-09-16
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-11
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)