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Quenching of star formation from a lack of inflowing gas to galaxies

Abstract

Star formation in half of massive galaxies was quenched by the time the Universe was 3 billion years old1. Very low amounts of molecular gas seem to be responsible for this, at least in some cases2,3,4,5,6,7, although morphological gas stabilization, shock heating or activity associated with accretion onto a central supermassive black hole are invoked in other cases8,9,10,11. Recent studies of quenching by gas depletion have been based on upper limits that are insufficiently sensitive to determine this robustly2,3,4,5,6,7, or stacked emission with its problems of averaging8,9. Here we report 1.3 mm observations of dust emission from 6 strongly lensed galaxies where star formation has been quenched, with magnifications of up to a factor of 30. Four of the six galaxies are undetected in dust emission, with an estimated upper limit on the dust mass of 0.0001 times the stellar mass, and by proxy (assuming a Milky Way molecular gas-to-dust ratio) 0.01 times the stellar mass in molecular gas. This is two orders of magnitude less molecular gas per unit stellar mass than seen in star forming galaxies at similar redshifts12,13,14. It remains difficult to extrapolate from these small samples, but these observations establish that gas depletion is responsible for a cessation of star formation in some fraction of high-redshift galaxies.

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Fig. 1: Images of six massive lensed galaxies for which star formation has been quenched.
Fig. 2: Low dust masses for quenched galaxies.
Fig. 3: Low molecular gas masses compared to star forming galaxies.

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Data availability

Data that support the findings of this study are publicly available through the ALMA Science Archive under project codes 2018.1.00276.S and 2019.1.00227.S and the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescope under project code HST-GO-15663 (including additional archival data from project codes HST-GO-9722, HST-GO-9836, HST-SNAP-11103, HST-GO-11591, HST-GO-12099, HST-GO-12100, HST-SNAP-12884, HST-GO-13459, HST-SNAP-14098, HST-GO-14205, HST-GO-14496, HST-SNAP-15132 and HST-GO-15466). All HST and ALMA mosaics are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5009315. Derived data and codes supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

This paper makes use of ADS/JAO.ALMA 2018.1.00276.S and ADS/JAO.ALMA 2019.1.00227.S ALMA data. ALMA is a partnership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO; representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan) and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ. The NRAO is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities. This work uses observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. K.E.W. wishes to acknowledge funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, HST-GO-14622 and HST-GO-15663. C.C.W. acknowledges support from the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship grant AST-1701546 and from the NIRCam Development Contract NAS50210 from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to the University of Arizona. S.T. acknowledges support from the ERC Consolidator Grant funding scheme (project ConTExt, grant no. 648179), F.V. from the Carlsberg Foundation Research Grant CF18-0388, and G.E.M. from the Villum Fonden research grant 13160. The Cosmic Dawn Center is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under grant no. 140. C.P. is supported by the Canadian Space Agency under a contract with NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics. M.A. acknowledges support from NASA under award no. 80NSSC19K1418. J.S.S. is a NHFP Hubble Fellow supported by NASA Hubble Fellowship grant no. HF2-51446 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. A.M. is supported by a Dunlap Fellowship at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, funded through an endowment established by the David Dunlap family and the University of Toronto. D.N. acknowledges support from the NSF via AST-1908137.

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Contributions

K.E.W. proposed and carried out the observations, conducted the analysis, and wrote the majority of the manuscript. C.C.W. performed the weighted stack of the data, helped to create Figs. 2 and 3, and edited the main text of the manuscript. L.M. performed direct analysis of the ALMA flux densities and created the images in Fig. 1. J.S.S. carried out the reduction and direct analysis of the raw ALMA data. M.A. reduced the HST images, and M.A. and J.L. performed a stellar population synthesis analysis. G.E.M., A.P., S.T. and F.V. helped to interpret the millimetre data and contributed to the dust and gas mass analysis. D.N. helped to interpret the data in the context of cosmological simulation models. All authors, including R.B., G.B.B., J.L., A.M., E.J.N., C.P., K.S. and P.G.v.D., contributed to the overall interpretation of the results and aspects of the analysis and writing.

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Correspondence to Katherine E. Whitaker.

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Whitaker, K.E., Williams, C.C., Mowla, L. et al. Quenching of star formation from a lack of inflowing gas to galaxies. Nature 597, 485–488 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03806-7

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