The first catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed red nuggets at z~0.7 from the VIPERS survey. Linking high-z red nuggets and local relics

Abstract

'Red nuggets' are a rare population of passive compact massive galaxies thought to be the first massive galaxies that formed in the Universe. First found at $z\sim 3$, they are even less abundant at lower redshifts, and it is believed that with time they mostly transformed through mergers into today's giant ellipticals. Those red nuggets which managed to escape this fate can serve as unique laboratories to study the early evolution of massive galaxies. In this paper, we aim to make use of the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey to build the largest up-to-date catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed red nuggets at the intermediate redshift $0.5<z<1.0$. Starting from a catalogue of nearly 90 000 VIPERS galaxies we select sources with stellar masses $M_{star}>8\times 10^{10}$ ${\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$ and effective radii $R_{\mathrm{e}}<1.5$ kpc. Among them, we select red, passive galaxies with old stellar population based on colour--colour NUVrK diagram, star formation rate values, and verification of their optical spectra. Verifying the influence of the limit of the source compactness on the selection, we found that the sample size can vary even up to two orders of magnitude, depending on the chosen criterion. Using one of the most restrictive criteria with additional checks on their spectra and passiveness, we spectroscopically identified only 77 previously unknown red nuggets. The resultant catalogue of 77 red nuggets is the largest such catalogue built based on the uniform set of selection criteria above the local Universe. Number density calculated on the final sample of 77 VIPERS passive red nuggets per comoving Mpc${}^3$ increases from 4.7$\times 10^{-6}$ at $z\sim 0.61$ to $9.8\times 10^{-6}$ at $z\sim 0.95$, which is higher than values estimated in the local Universe, and lower than the ones found at $z>2$. It fills the gap at intermediate redshift.

Accepted for publication in A&A, 16 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (16)

• The Sixteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release from the APOGEE-2 Southern Survey and Full Release of eBOSS Spectra
• 3D-HST+CANDELS: The Evolution of the Galaxy Size-Mass Distribution since $z=3$
• The Herschel view of the dominant mode of galaxy growth from z=4 to the present day
• Compaction and Quenching of High-z Galaxies in Cosmological Simulations: Blue and Red Nuggets
• Superdense massive galaxies in the Nearby Universe
• Cold dust and stellar emissions in dust-rich galaxies observed with ALMA: a challenge for SED-fitting techniques
• Knocking on giants' doors: I. The evolution of the dust-to-stellar mass ratio in distant dusty galaxies
• The Number Density of Quiescent Compact Galaxies at Intermediate Redshift
• Dozens of compact and high velocity-dispersion early-type galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• INSPIRE: INvestigating Stellar Population In RElics -- I. Survey presentation and pilot program
• Building the largest spectroscopic sample of ultra-compact massive galaxies with the Kilo Degree Survey
• The Type II AGN-host galaxy connection: insights from the VVDS and VIPERS surveys
• Shaping physical properties of galaxy subtypes in the VIPERS survey: environment matters
• Relic galaxy analogues in Illustris TNG50: the formation pathways of surviving red nuggets in a cosmological simulation
• Synergies between low- and intermediate-redshift galaxy populations revealed with unsupervised machine learning
• The fundamental metallicity relation from SDSS (z~0) to VIPERS (z~0.7) Data selection or evolution

Cited by in corpus (10)

• CEERS Key Paper V: A triality on the nature of HST-dark galaxies
• The massive relic galaxy NGC 1277 is dark matter deficient. From dynamical models of integral-field stellar kinematics out to five effective radii
• Environments of red nuggets at z~0.7 from the VIPERS survey
• DESI Massive Post-Starburst Galaxies at $\mathbf{z}\sim 1.2$ have compact structures and dense cores
• ZF-UDS-7329: A relic galaxy in the early Universe
• From VIPERS to SDSS: Unveiling galaxy spectra evolution over 9 Gyr through unsupervised machine-learning
• Distinguishing the formation paths of massive compact ETGs through their internal dynamical structures
• INSPIRE: INvestigating Stellar Populations In RElics. IX. KiDS J0842+0059: the first fully confirmed relic beyond the local Universe
• X-ray properties of massive compact relic galaxies
• Chemical Enrichment of Isolated Relic Galaxy Mrk1216