ZF-UDS-7329: A relic galaxy in the early Universe

Abstract

The formation time scales of quiescent galaxies can be estimated in two different ways: by their star formation history and by their chemistry. Previously, the methods yielded conflicting results, especially when considering $\alpha$-enhanced objects. This is primarily due to the time resolution limitations of very old stellar populations, which prevent accurately constraining their star formation histories. We analysed the JWST observations of the extremely massive galaxy ZF-UDS-7329 at z$\sim$3.2 and show that the higher time resolution necessary to match the chemical formation time scales using stellar population synthesis can be achieved by studying galaxies at high redshift. We compare the massive galaxy to the well-known relic galaxy NGC~1277, arguing that ZF-UDS-7329 is an early Universe example of the cores of present-day massive elliptical galaxies or, if left untouched, a relic galaxy.

Accepted for publication in A&A, 5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (13)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
• Measuring the inclination and mass-to-light ratio of axisymmetric galaxies via anisotropic Jeans models of stellar kinematics
• The Atlas3D Project - XXX. Star formation histories and stellar population scaling relations of early-type galaxies
• Evolutionary stellar population synthesis with MILES - II. Scaled-solar and α-enhanced models
• An Atlas of Color-selected Quiescent Galaxies at $z>3$ in Public $JWST$ Fields
• Radial variations in the stellar initial mass function of early-type galaxies
• Extreme Value Statistics of the Halo and Stellar Mass Distributions at High Redshift: are JWST Results in Tension with ΛCDM?
• The initial mass function of a massive relic galaxy
• Further evidence for a time-dependent initial mass function in massive early-type galaxies
• INSPIRE: INvestigating Stellar Population In RElics -- I. Survey presentation and pilot program
• Implications of a Temperature Dependent IMF I: Photometric Template Fitting
• [Mg/Fe] and variable initial mass function: Revision of [$\alpha$/Fe] for massive galaxies

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Evolution of massive quiescent galaxies via envelope accretion