The Fate of the Interstellar Medium in Early-type Galaxies. II. Observational Evidence for Morphological Quenching

Abstract

The mechanism by which galaxies stop forming stars and get rid of their interstellar medium (ISM) remains elusive. Here, we study a sample of more than two thousand elliptical galaxies in which dust emission has been detected. This is the largest sample of such galaxies ever analysed. We infer the timescale for removal of dust in these galaxies and investigate its dependency on physical and environmental properties. We obtain a dust removal timescale in elliptical galaxies of $\tau$ = 2.26 $\pm$ 0.18 Gyr, corresponding to a half-life time of 1.57 $\pm$ 0.12 Gyr. This timescale does not depend on environment, stellar mass or redshift. We observe a departure of dusty elliptical galaxies from the star formation rate vs. dust mass relation. This is caused by the star-formation rates declining faster than the dust masses and indicates that there exists an internal mechanism, which affects star formation, but leaves the ISM intact. Morphological quenching together with ionisation or outflows caused by older stellar populations (supernova type Ia or planetary nebulae) are consistent with these observations.

10 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (8)

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• The fate of the interstellar medium in early-type galaxies. IV. The impact of stellar feedback, mergers, and black holes on the cold ISM in simulated galaxies
• A${}^3$COSMOS: The dust content of massive quiescent galaxies and its evolution with cosmic time
• Dust sub-millimetre emission in green valley galaxies
• Dust removal timescale in galaxies across cosmic time
• The Origin of the Gas and Its Low Star Formation Efficiency in Quiescent Galaxies
• Diverse reddening distributions in sight lines to type Ia supernovae
• The Evolution of the SFR-M_* relation at 0.1<z<4: Environmental and Morphological Dependencies