The fate of a red nugget: In-situ star formation of satellites around a massive compact galaxy

TL;DR

This study investigates the satellite galaxies around a massive compact galaxy at high redshift, finding in-situ star formation in satellites could significantly contribute to the galaxy's mass growth and evolution into a local massive galaxy.

Contribution

It provides new observational evidence of satellite star formation activity around a compact galaxy at z~1.92, highlighting its role in galaxy mass assembly and evolution.

Findings

34 confirmed star-forming satellites within 300 kpc.

In-situ star formation in satellites can account for the galaxy's mass growth.

Most satellites are consistent with the star formation main sequence.

Abstract

To study the accretion phase for local massive galaxies, we search accreting satellites around a massive compact galaxy (M_*~3.9x10^10Msun), spectroscopically confirmed (z_spec-1.9213) in the eXtreme Deep Field, which has been originally reported in Szomoru et al. We detect 1369 satellite candidates within the projected virial radius (rvir~300 kpc) of the compact galaxy in the all-combined ACS image with 5sigma-limiting magnitude of mACS~30.6 ABmag, which corresponds to ~1.6x10^7M_sun at the redshift. The photometric redshift measured with 12 multi-band images confirms 34 satellites out of the candidates. Most of the satellites are found to have the rest-frame colors consistent with star forming galaxies. We investigate the relation between stellar mass and star formation rate (the star formation main sequence), and find the steeper slope at the low-mass end (<10^8M_sun), while more massive satellites are consistently on the sequence reported in previous studies. Within the uncertainties of star formation and photometric redshift, we conjecture possible scenarios for the compact galaxy which evolves to a local massive galaxy by way of significant size and mass growth. While merging of the existing total stellar mass of the satellites is not enough to explain the mass growth predicted by observations and simulations, the contribution by in-situ star formation in the satellites would compensate the deficit. Provided that most satellites keep the observed in-situ star formation and then quench before they accrete by, e.g., environmental quenching, the compact galaxy would become a massive early-type galaxy consistent with the local size-mass relation.