• DOI:10.1086/508371
• Corpus ID: 16145121

Spectroscopic Identification of Massive Galaxies at z ~ 2.3 with Strongly Suppressed Star Formation*

@article{Kriek2006SpectroscopicIO,
  title={Spectroscopic Identification of Massive Galaxies at z ~ 2.3 with Strongly Suppressed Star Formation*},
  author={Mariska Kriek and Pieter van Dokkum and Marijn Franx and Ryan F. Quadri and Eric Gawiser and David Herrera and Garth D. Illingworth and Ivo Labb{\'e} and Paulina Lira and Danilo Marchesini and Hans-Walter Rix and Gregory H. Rudnick and Edward Taylor and Sune Toft and M. Urry and Stijn Wuyts},
  journal={The Astrophysical Journal},
  year={2006},
  volume={649}
}

• M. Kriek, P. Dokkum, +13 authors S. Wuyts
• Published 21 August 2006
• Physics
• The Astrophysical Journal

We present first results of a spectroscopic survey targeting K-selected galaxies at z = 2.0-2.7 using the Gemini near-infrared spectrograph (GNIRS). We obtained near-infrared spectra with a wavelength coverage of 1.0-2.5 μm for 26 K-bright galaxies (K < 19.7) selected from the Multi-wavelength Survey by Yale-Chile (MUSYC) using photometric redshifts. We successfully derived spectroscopic redshifts for all 26 galaxies using rest-frame optical emission lines or the redshifted Balmer/4000 A break. Twenty galaxies have spectroscopic redshifts in the range 2.0 < z < 2.7, for which bright emission lines like Hα and [O III] fall in atmospheric windows. Surprisingly, we detected no emission lines for nine of these 20 galaxies. The median 2 σ upper limit on the rest-frame equivalent width of Hα for these nine galaxies is ~10 A. The stellar continuum emission of these same nine galaxies is best fitted by evolved stellar population models. The best-fit star formation rate (SFR) is zero for five out of nine galaxies and is consistent with zero within 1 σ for the remaining four. Thus, both the Hα measurements and the independent stellar continuum modeling imply that 45% of our K-selected galaxies are not forming stars intensely. This high fraction of galaxies without detected line emission and low SFRs may imply that the suppression of star formation in massive galaxies occurs at higher redshift than is predicted by current cold dark matter (CDM) galaxy formation models. However, obscured star formation may have been missed, and deep mid-infrared imaging is needed to clarify this situation.