Massive Quiescent Disk Galaxies at $0.5\ {\leq}\ z\ {\leq}\ 1$ in CANDELS : Color Gradients and Likely Origin

TL;DR

This study identifies and analyzes a rare population of massive, quiescent, disk-dominated galaxies at redshifts 0.5 to 1.0, revealing their structural properties and suggesting secular disk fading as a key formation process.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the color gradients and structural features of massive quiescent disk galaxies at intermediate redshifts, proposing secular fading as their likely origin.

Findings

Quiescent disk galaxies have extended stellar disks and tiny bulges.

Disks in quiescent galaxies are fully quenched at all radii.

Color gradients indicate flat sSFR profiles across the disks.

Abstract

A rare population of massive disk-dominated quiescent galaxies has recently drawn much attention, which intrudes the red sequence population without destroying the underlying stellar disks. In this study, we have carefully identified 48 red sequence (RS), disk-dominated galaxies with $M_{\ast} > 10^{10}M_{\odot}$ between redshift 0.5 and 1.0 in all five CANDELS fields. These galaxies are well fitted by a two-component bulge plus disk model, and have the bulge-to-total ratio $B/T<0.4$ in the both F814W and F160W bands. The fitting results indicate that these galaxies generally have extended stellar disks ($\rm \sim 3~kpc$ on average) and tiny bulge components ($\rm \sim 0.5~kpc$ on average). To understand their possible origins, we have also selected two control samples of 156 green valley (GV) and 309 blue cloud (BC) disk-dominated galaxies according to the same selection criteria. We study the $UVI$($U-V$ versus $V-I$) color gradients of these galaxies to infer their specific star formation rate (sSFR) gradients out to the maximum acceptable radii. We show that on average the disks in disk-dominated RS galaxies are fully quenched at all radii, whereas both the BC and GV disks are not fully quenched at any radii. We find that all the BC, GV and RS disk galaxies generally have nearly flat sSFR profiles. We propose a potential formation mechanism, acknowledging that various other mechanisms (e.g., central compaction and AGN feedback) might contribute, where massive quiescent disk-dominated galaxies are predominantly formed via a process of secular disk fading.