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Size–Stellar Mass Relation and Morphology of Quiescent Galaxies at z ≥ 3 in Public JWST Fields

2024; IOP Publishing; Volume: 964; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3847/1538-4357/ad2512

1538-4357

Kei Ito, Francesco Valentino, Gabriel Brammer, Andreas L. Faisst, Steven Gillman, Carlos Gómez-Guijarro, Katriona M. L. Gould, K. E. Heintz, O. Ilbert, Christian Kragh Jespersen, Vasily Kokorev, Mariko Kubo, G. Magdis, Conor McPartland, Masato Onodera, Francesca Rizzo, Masayuki Tanaka, Sune Toft, Aswin P. Vijayan, John R. Weaver, Katherine E. Whitaker, Lillian Wright,

Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae

Abstract We present the results of a systematic study of the rest-frame optical morphology of quiescent galaxies at z ≥ 3 using the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Based on a sample selected by UVJ color or NUVUVJ color, we focus on 26 quiescent galaxies with <?CDATA $9.8\lt \mathrm{log}({M}_{\star }/{M}_{\odot })\lt 11.4$?> 9.8 < log ( M ⋆ / M ⊙ ) < 11.4 at 2.8 < z phot < 4.6 with publicly available JWST data. Their sizes are constrained by fitting the Sérsic profile to all available NIRCam images. We see a negative correlation between the observed wavelength and the size and derive their size at the rest frame 0.5 μ m using size measurements in multiple bands. Our quiescent galaxies show a significant correlation between the rest-frame 0.5 μ m size and the stellar mass at z ≥ 3. The analytical fit for them at <?CDATA $\mathrm{log}({M}_{\star }/{M}_{\odot })\gt 10.3$?> log ( M ⋆ / M ⊙ ) > 10.3 implies that our size–stellar mass relations are below those at lower redshifts, with the amplitude of ∼0.6 kpc at M ⋆ = 5 × 10 10 M ⊙ . This value agrees with the extrapolation of the size evolution of quiescent galaxies at z < 3 in the literature, implying that the size of quiescent galaxies increases monotonically from z ∼ 3–5. Our sample mainly comprises galaxies with bulge-like structures according to their median Sérsic index and axis ratio of n ∼ 3–4 and q ∼ 0.6–0.8, respectively. On the other hand, there is a trend of increasing fraction of galaxies with low Sérsic index at higher redshift, suggesting 3 < z < 5 might be the epoch of onset of morphological transformation with a fraction of very notable disky quenched galaxies.