The Coevolution of Massive Quiescent Galaxies and Their Dark Matter Halos over the Last 6 Billion Years

Abstract

We investigate the growth of massive quiescent galaxies at $z<0.6$ based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Smithsonian Hectospec Lensing Survey---two magnitude limited spectroscopic surveys of high data quality and completeness. Our three parameter model links quiescent galaxies across cosmic time by self-consistently evolving stellar mass, stellar population age sensitive $D_{n}4000$ index, half-light radius and stellar velocity dispersion. Stellar velocity dispersion is a robust proxy of dark matter halo mass; we use it to connect galaxies and dark matter halos and thus empirically constrain their coevolution. The typical rate of stellar mass growth is $\sim 10M_{\odot }{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$ and dark matter growth rates from our empirical model are remarkably consistent with N-body simulations. Massive quiescent galaxies grow by minor mergers with dark matter halos of mass $10^{10}{M}_{\odot }\lesssim M_{DM}\lesssim 10^{12}{M}_{\odot }$ and evolve parallel to the stellar mass-halo mass relation based on N-body simulations. Thus, the stellar mass-halo mass relation of massive galaxies apparently results primarily from dry minor merging.

Updated to accepted version