An extremely dense group of massive galaxies at the centre of the protocluster at z = 3.09 in the SSA22 field

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of an extremely dense group of massive galaxies at z=3.09 in the SSA22 protocluster, likely representing a proto-brightest cluster galaxy in formation, with implications for galaxy evolution.

Contribution

It presents the first spectroscopic confirmation of a dense, massive galaxy group at high redshift, linking it to future cluster formation and galaxy evolution models.

Findings

The group comprises seven galaxies within 180 kpc at z=3.09.

The dynamical mass of the group is approximately 1.6×10^{13} solar masses.

Over half of the descendant's stellar mass had formed by z=3.

Abstract

We report the discovery of an extremely dense group of massive galaxies at the centre of the protocluster at $z=3.09$ in the SSA22 field from near-infrared spectroscopy conducted with the Multi-Object InfraRed Camera and Spectrograph (MOIRCS) equipped on the Subaru Telecope. The newly discovered group comprises seven galaxies confirmed at $z_{\rm spec}\approx3.09$ within 180 kpc including five massive objects with the stellar masses larger than $10^{10.5}~M_{\odot}$ and is associated with a bright sub-mm source SSA22-AzTEC14. The dynamical mass of the group estimated from the line-of-sight velocity dispersion of the members is $M_{\rm dyn}\sim1.6\pm0.3\times10^{13}~M_{\odot}$. Such a dense group is expected to be very rare at high redshift as we found only a few comparable systems in large-volume cosmological simulations. Such rare groups in the simulations are hosted in collapsed halos with $M_{\rm vir}=10^{13.4}-10^{14.0}~M_{\odot}$ and evolve into the brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) of the most massive clusters at present. The observed AzTEC14 group at $z=3.09$ is therefore very likely to be a proto-BCG in the multiple merger phase. The observed total stellar mass of the group is $5.8^{+5.1}_{-2.0}\times10^{11}~M_{\odot}$. It suggests that over half the stellar mass of its descendant had been formed by $z=3$. Moreover, we identified over two members for each of the four Ly$\alpha$ blobs (LABs) using our new spectroscopic data. This verifies our previous argument that many of the LABs in the SSA22 protocluster associated with multiple developed stellar components.