Professor Roger Davies

Abstract:

This paper presents the first effort to Extend the Investigation of Stellar Populations In RElics (E-INSPIRE). We present a catalogue of 430 spectroscopically confirmed ultra-compact massive galaxies (UCMGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at redshifts . This increases the original INSPIRE sample eightfold, bridging the gap with the local Universe. For each object, we compute integrated stellar velocity dispersion, age, metallicity, and [Mg/Fe] through spectroscopic stellar population analysis. We infer star formation histories (SFHs), metallicity evolution histories (MEHs) and compute the Degree of Relicness (DoR) of each object. The UCMGs, covering a wide range of DoR from 0.05 to 0.88, can be divided into three groups, according to how extreme their SFH was. The first group consists of 81 extreme relics () that have formed the totality of their stellar mass by and have super-solar metallicities at all cosmic epochs. The second group () contains 293 objects also characterized by peaked SFHs but with a small percentage of later-formed stars and with a variety of MEHs. The third group (), has 56 objects that cannot be considered relics since they have extended SFHs and formed a non-negligible fraction ( per cent) of their stellar mass at . We conclude that the most efficient method of finding relics is to select UCMGs with a combination of large velocity dispersion values (as already found by INSPIRE), super-solar metallicities and high [Mg/Fe].

Abstract:

We present a kinematic analysis of the main-sequence galaxy HZ4 at z = 5.5. Our study is based on deep, spatially resolved observations of the [C II] 158 μm transition obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). From the combined analysis of the disk morphology, the 2D velocity structure, and forward modeling of the 1D velocity and velocity dispersion profiles, we conclude that HZ4 has a regular rotating disk in place. The intrinsic velocity dispersion in HZ4 is high (σ0 = 65.8−3.3+2.9 km s−1), and the ratio between the rotational velocity and the intrinsic velocity dispersion is Vrot/σ0 = 2.2. These values are consistent with the expectations from the trends of increasing σ0 and decreasing Vrot/σ0 as a function of the redshift observed in main-sequence galaxies up to z ≈ 4. Galaxy evolution models suggest that the high level of turbulence observed in HZ4 can only be achieved if, in addition to stellar feedback, there is radial transport of gas within the disk. Finally, we find that HZ4 is baryon-dominated on galactic scales (≲2 × Re), with a dark-matter fraction at one effective radius of fDM(Re) = 0.41−0.22+0.25. This value is comparable to the dark-matter fractions found in lower redshift galaxies that could be the descendants of HZ4: massive (M⋆ ≈ 1011 M⊙), star-forming galaxies at z ∼ 2, and passive, early-type galaxies at z ≈ 0.