Near-infrared Spectroscopy of Five Ultra-massive Galaxies at 1.7 < z < 2.7
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Issue Date
2017-03-20Author
Kado-Fong, Erin
Marchesini, Danilo
Marsan, Z. Cemile
Muzzin, Adam
Quadri, Ryan
Brammer, Gabriel
Bezanson, Rachel
Labbé, Ivo
Lundgren, Britt
Rudnick, Gregory H.
Stefanon, Mauro
Tal, Tomer
Wake, David
Williams, Rik
Whitaker, Katherine
van Dokkum, Pieter
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
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Show full item recordAbstract
We present the results of a pilot near-infrared spectroscopic campaign of five very massive galaxies ($\mathrm{log}({M}_{\star }/{M}_{\odot })\gt 11.45$) in the range of $1.7\lt z\lt 2.7$. We measure an absorption feature redshift for one galaxy at ${z}_{\mathrm{spec}}=2.000\pm 0.006$. For the remaining galaxies, we combine the photometry with the continuum from the spectra to estimate continuum redshifts and stellar population properties. We define a continuum redshift (${z}_{\mathrm{cont}}$ ) as one in which the redshift is estimated probabilistically from the combination of catalog photometry and the observed spectrum using EAZY. We derive the uncertainties on the stellar population synthesis properties using a Monte Carlo simulation and examine the correlations between the parameters with and without the use of the spectrum in the modeling of the spectral energy distributions. The spectroscopic constraints confirm the extreme stellar masses of the galaxies in our sample. We find that three out of five galaxies are quiescent (star-formation rate of $\lesssim 1{M}_{\odot }\,{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$) with low levels of dust obscuration (${A}_{{\rm{V}}}\lt 1$) , that one galaxy displays both high levels of star formation and dust obscuration ($\mathrm{SFR}\approx 300{M}_{\odot }\,{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$, ${A}_{{\rm{V}}}\approx 1.7$ mag), and that the remaining galaxy has properties that are intermediate between the quiescent and star-forming populations.
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Citation
Kado-Fong, E., Marchesini, D., Marsan, Z. C., Muzzin, A., Quadri, R., Brammer, G., ... & Stefanon, M. (2017). Near-infrared Spectroscopy of Five Ultra-massive Galaxies at 1.7< z< 2.7. The Astrophysical Journal, 838(1), 57.
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