The effect of the morphological quenching mechanism on star formation activity at 0.5 < z < 1.5 in 3D-HST/CANDELS

TL;DR

This study investigates how morphological quenching influences star formation in massive green valley galaxies at redshifts 0.5 to 1.5, highlighting the role of galaxy structure over environment.

Contribution

It introduces a dimensionless morphological quenching efficiency, $Q_{mor}$, and demonstrates its significance in star formation suppression independent of stellar mass and redshift.

Findings

ETD galaxies have higher concentration and lower star formation rates than LTDs.

Environmental differences are negligible between ETD and LTD galaxies.

Morphological quenching likely dominates over environmental effects in star formation regulation.

Abstract

Several mechanisms for the transformation of blue star-forming to red quiescent galaxies have been proposed, and the green valley (GV) galaxies amid them are widely accepted in a transitional phase. Thus, comparing the morphological and environmental differences of the GV galaxies with early-type disks (ETDs; bulge dominated and having a disk) and late-type disks (LTDs; disk dominated) is suitable for distinguishing the corresponding quenching mechanisms. A large population of massive ($M_* \geqslant 10^{10}M_\odot$) GV galaxies at $0.5 \leqslant z \leqslant 1.5$ in 3D-HST/CANDELS is selected using extinction-corrected $(U-V)_{\rm rest}$ color. After eliminating any possible active galactic nucleus candidates and considering the "mass-matching", we finally construct two comparable samples of GV galaxies with either 319 ETD or 319 LTD galaxies. Compared to the LTD galaxies, it is found that the ETD galaxies possess higher concentration index and lower specific star formation rate, whereas the environments surrounding them are not different. This may suggest that the morphological quenching may dominate the star formation activity of massive GV galaxies rather than the environmental quenching. To quantify the correlation between the galaxy morphology and the star formation activity, we define a dimensionless morphology quenching efficiency $Q_{\rm mor}$ and find that $Q_{\rm mor}$ is not sensitive to the stellar mass and redshift. When the difference between the average star formation rate of ETD and LTD galaxies is about 0.7 $M_\odot \rm \;yr^{-1}$, the probability of $Q_{\rm mor}\gtrsim 0.2$ is higher than 90\%, which implies that the degree of morphological quenching in GV galaxies might be described by $Q_{\rm mor}\gtrsim 0.2$.