Quenching of star formation from a lack of inflowing gas to galaxies

Katherine E. Whitaker (), Christina C. Williams, Lamiya Mowla, Justin S. Spilker, Sune Toft, Desika Narayanan, Alexandra Pope, Georgios E. Magdis, Pieter G. Dokkum, Mohammad Akhshik, Rachel Bezanson, Gabriel B. Brammer, Joel Leja, Allison Man, Erica J. Nelson, Johan Richard, Camilla Pacifici, Keren Sharon and Francesco Valentino
Additional contact information
Katherine E. Whitaker: University of Massachusetts
Christina C. Williams: University of Arizona
Lamiya Mowla: University of Toronto
Justin S. Spilker: University of Texas at Austin
Sune Toft: Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN)
Desika Narayanan: Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN)
Alexandra Pope: University of Massachusetts
Georgios E. Magdis: Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN)
Pieter G. Dokkum: Yale University
Mohammad Akhshik: University of Connecticut
Rachel Bezanson: University of Pittsburgh
Gabriel B. Brammer: Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN)
Joel Leja: The Pennsylvania State University
Allison Man: University of British Columbia
Erica J. Nelson: University of Colorado
Johan Richard: Université Lyon 1, ENS de Lyon, CNRS, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon UMR5574
Camilla Pacifici: Space Telescope Science Institute
Keren Sharon: University of Michigan
Francesco Valentino: Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN)

Nature, 2021, vol. 597, issue 7877, 485-488

Abstract: Abstract Star formation in half of massive galaxies was quenched by the time the Universe was 3 billion years old1. Very low amounts of molecular gas seem to be responsible for this, at least in some cases2–7, although morphological gas stabilization, shock heating or activity associated with accretion onto a central supermassive black hole are invoked in other cases8–11. Recent studies of quenching by gas depletion have been based on upper limits that are insufficiently sensitive to determine this robustly2–7, or stacked emission with its problems of averaging8,9. Here we report 1.3 mm observations of dust emission from 6 strongly lensed galaxies where star formation has been quenched, with magnifications of up to a factor of 30. Four of the six galaxies are undetected in dust emission, with an estimated upper limit on the dust mass of 0.0001 times the stellar mass, and by proxy (assuming a Milky Way molecular gas-to-dust ratio) 0.01 times the stellar mass in molecular gas. This is two orders of magnitude less molecular gas per unit stellar mass than seen in star forming galaxies at similar redshifts12–14. It remains difficult to extrapolate from these small samples, but these observations establish that gas depletion is responsible for a cessation of star formation in some fraction of high-redshift galaxies.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03806-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:597:y:2021:i:7877:d:10.1038_s41586-021-03806-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03806-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().