A spectroscopic follow-up program of very massive galaxies at 3<z<4: confirmation of spectroscopic redshifts, and a high fraction of powerful AGN

TL;DR

This study spectroscopically confirms redshifts and reveals a high prevalence of luminous AGNs in massive galaxies at 3<z<4, highlighting the importance of AGN activity in early galaxy evolution.

Contribution

It provides the first spectroscopic confirmation of redshifts and AGN prevalence in a mass-selected sample of galaxies at z>3, improving understanding of galaxy and black hole growth.

Findings

Over 80% of the sample host luminous hidden AGNs.

Spectroscopic redshifts confirmed for half the sample.

AGN fraction increases rapidly from ~30% to ~60-100% between z~2 and z~3.

Abstract

We present the analysis and results of a spectroscopic follow-up program of a mass-selected sample of six galaxies at 3 < z < 4 using data from Keck-NIRSPEC and VLT-Xshooter. We confirm the z > 3 redshifts for half of the sample through the detection of strong nebular emission lines, and improve the zphot accuracy for the remainder of the sample through the combination of photometry and spectra. The modeling of the emission-line-corrected spectral energy distributions (SEDs) adopting improved redshifts confirms the very large stellar masses of the sample (M_* ~ 1.5-4 x 10^11 Msun) in the first 2 Gyrs of cosmic history, with a diverse range in stellar ages, star formation rates and dust content. From the analysis of emission line luminosities and widths, and far-infrared (FIR) fluxes we confirm that >80% of the sample are hosts to luminous hidden active galactic nuclei (AGNs), with bolometric luminosities of ~10^(44-46) erg/s. We find that the MIPS 24um photometry is largely contaminated by AGN continuum, rendering the SFRs derived using only 24um photometry to be severely overestimated. By including the emission from the AGN in the modeling of the UV-to-FIR SEDs, we confirm that the presence of the AGN does not bias considerably the stellar masses (< 0.3 dex at 1\sigma). We show evidence for a rapid increase of the AGN fraction from ~30% to ~60-100% over the 1 Gyr between z~2 and z~3. Although we cannot exclude some enhancement of the AGN fraction for our sample due to selection effects, the small measured [OIII] contamination to the observed K-band fluxes suggests that our sample is not significantly biased toward massive galaxies hosting AGNs.