Explaining ultra-massive quiescent galaxies at $3<z<5$ in the context of their environments

Abstract

The swift assembly of the earliest galaxies poses a significant challenge to our understanding of galaxy formation. Ultra-massive quiescent galaxies at intermediate redshifts ($3<z<5$) currently present one of the most pressing problems for theoretical modeling, since very few mechanisms can be invoked to explain how such galaxies formed so early in the history of the Universe. Here, we exploit the fact that these galaxies all reside within significant overdensities to explain their masses. To this end, we construct and release a modified version of the Extreme Value Statistics (EVS) code which takes into account galaxy environment by incorporating clustering in the calculation. With this new version of EVS, we find that ultra-massive quiescent galaxies at $3<z<5$ do not present as serious a tension with simple models of galaxy formation when the analysis of a given galaxy is conditioned on its environment.

9 pages, 3 figures. Accepted to ApJL. Code available at https://github.com/astrockragh/evs_clustering

References in corpus (26)

• 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
• The propagation of uncertainties in stellar population synthesis modeling I: The relevance of uncertain aspects of stellar evolution and the IMF to the derived physical properties of galaxies
• Efficient Formation of Massive Galaxies at Cosmic Dawn by Feedback-Free Starbursts
• Spectroscopic confirmation of two luminous galaxies at $z\sim 14$
• A massive quiescent galaxy at redshift 4.658
• The brightest galaxies at Cosmic Dawn
• An Atlas of Color-selected Quiescent Galaxies at $z>3$ in Public $JWST$ Fields
• COSMOS2020: The Galaxy Stellar Mass Function: the assembly and star formation cessation of galaxies at $0.2<z\le 7.5$
• A surprising abundance of massive quiescent galaxies at 3 < z < 5 in the first data from JWST CEERS
• Extreme Value Statistics of the Halo and Stellar Mass Distributions at High Redshift: are JWST Results in Tension with ΛCDM?
• First Light And Reionisation Epoch Simulations (FLARES) I: Environmental Dependence of High-Redshift Galaxy Evolution
• A massive galaxy that formed its stars at $z\sim 11$
• RUBIES: a complete census of the bright and red distant Universe with JWST/NIRSpec
• COSMOS2020: The cosmic evolution of the stellar-to-halo mass relation for central and satellite galaxies up to z~5
• A population of faint, old, and massive quiescent galaxies at 3 < z < 4 revealed by JWST NIRSpec Spectroscopy
• Templates for Fitting Photometry of Ultra-High-Redshift Galaxies
• Characterising and Identifying Galaxy Protoclusters
• COSMOS-Web: stellar mass assembly in relation to dark matter halos across $0.2<z<12$ of cosmic history
• $\text{Mangrove}$: Learning Galaxy Properties from Merger Trees
• Cosmic Vine: A z=3.44 large-scale structure hosting massive quiescent galaxies
• On the Significance of Rare Objects at High Redshift: The Impact of Cosmic Variance
• A merging pair of massive quiescent galaxies at $z=3.44$ in the Cosmic Vine
• How the Galaxy-Halo Connection Depends on Large-Scale Environment
• A New Stellar Mass Proxy for Subhalo Abundance Matching
• First Light and Reionisation Epoch Simulations (FLARES) X: Environmental Galaxy Bias and Survey Variance at High Redshift

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Exploring over 700 massive quiescent galaxies at z = 2-7: Demographics and stellar mass functions
• Double Trouble: Two spectroscopically confirmed low-mass quiescent galaxies at z>5 in overdensities
• The Nature of High-Redshift Massive Quiescent Galaxies -- Searching for RUBIES-UDS-QG-z7 in FLARES