Exploring over 700 massive quiescent galaxies at z = 2-7: Demographics and stellar mass functions

Abstract

High-redshift ($z>2$) massive quiescent galaxies are crucial tests of early galaxy formation and evolutionary mechanisms through their cosmic number densities and stellar mass functions (SMFs). We explore a sample of 743 massive (${\mathrm{M}}_{\ast }>10^{9.5}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$) quiescent galaxies from $z=2-7$ in over 800 arcmin${}^2$ of NIRCam imaging from a compilation of public JWST fields (with a total area $>$ 5 $\times$ previous JWST studies). We compute and report their cosmic number densities, stellar mass functions, and cosmic stellar mass density. We confirm a significant overabundance of massive quiescent galaxies relative to a range of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations and semi-analytic models (SAMs). We find that no simulations or SAMs accurately reproduce the SMF for massive quiescent galaxies at any redshift within the interval $z=2-5$. This shows that none of these models' feedback prescriptions are fully capturing high-z galaxy quenching, challenging the standard formation scenarios. We find a greater abundance of lower-mass (${\mathrm{M}}_{\ast }<10^{10}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$) quiescent galaxies than previously found, highlighting the importance of sSFR cuts rather than simple colour selection. We show the importance of this selection bias, alongside individual field-to-field variations caused by cosmic variance, in varying the observed quiescent galaxy SMF, especially at higher-z. We also find a steeper increase in the cosmic stellar mass density for massive quiescent galaxies than has been seen previously, with ${\rho }_{\ast }\propto (1+z{)}^{-7.2\pm 0.3}$, indicating the dramatic increase in the importance of galaxy quenching within these epochs.

arXiv comment19 pages, 12 figures, Accepted for publication in A&A

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