The Fundamental Plane of Massive Quiescent Galaxies at z~2

Abstract

We examine the Fundamental Plane (FP) and mass-to-light ratio ($M/L$) scaling relations using the largest sample of massive quiescent galaxies at $1.5<z<2.5$ to date. The FP ($r_e,{\sigma }_e,I_e$) is established using $19$ $UVJ$ quiescent galaxies from COSMOS with $Hubble$ $Space$ $Telescope$ $(HST)$ $H_{F160W}$ rest-frame optical sizes and X-shooter absorption line measured stellar velocity dispersions. For a very massive, $\log (M_{\ast }/M_{\odot })>11.26$, subset of 8 quiescent galaxies at $z>2$, from Stockmann et al. (2020), we show that they cannot passively evolve to the local Coma cluster relation alone and must undergo significant structural evolution to mimic the sizes of local massive galaxies. The evolution of the FP and $M/L$ scaling relations, from $z=2$ to present-day, for this subset are consistent with passive aging of the stellar population and minor merger structural evolution into the most massive galaxies in the Coma cluster and other massive elliptical galaxies from the MASSIVE Survey. Modeling the luminosity evolution from minor merger added stellar populations favors a history of merging with "dry" quiescent galaxies.

17 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Early results from GLASS-JWST. IX: First spectroscopic confirmation of low-mass quiescent galaxies at $z>2$ with NIRISS
• The evolution of compact massive quiescent and starforming galaxies derived from the $R_e-R_h$ and $M_{\mathrm{star}}-M_h$ relations
• A model for galaxy-galaxy strong lensing statistics in surveys
• Velocity dispersion function evolution from strong lensing statistics