What Is Inside Matters: Simulated Green Valley Galaxies Have Centrally Concentrated Star Formation

Abstract

In spatially resolved galaxy observations, star formation rate radial profiles are found to correlate with total specific star formation rates. A central depletion in star formation is thought to correlate with the globally depressed star formation rates of, for example, galaxies within the Green Valley. We present, for the first time, radial specific star formation rate profiles for a statistical sample of simulated galaxies from the Illustris and EAGLE large cosmological simulations. For galaxies on the star-forming sequence, simulated specific star formation rate profiles are in loose agreement with observations, although galaxies from the EAGLE simulation are too centrally peaked, and galaxies from Illustris have a steeper decline at large radii. However, both galaxy samples show centrally concentrated star formation for galaxies in the Green Valley at all galaxy stellar masses, indicating that quenching occurs from the outside-in, in strong conflict with observations of inside-out quenching. These results appear in spite of the different feedback models in these two simulations. We conclude that the distribution of star formation within galaxies is a strong additional constraint for star formation and feedback models in simulations, in particular related to the quenching of star formation.

arXiv commentApJL accepted

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