Oral Presentation

Understanding Quenching at High-z from their low-z counterparts

Author(s): Po-Feng Wu, NAOJ

Presenter: Po-Feng Wu (NAOJ)

Post-starburst galaxies are galaxies whose star formation shut down rapidly in the recent past. These galaxies are precious proxies to understand the truncation of star formation. However, obtaining spatially-resolved high-S/N spectra of high-redshift post-starburst galaxies is very expensive thus hinders the further investigation.

Instead, I use SDSS MaNGA IFU survey to search for local galaxies that would be classified as post-starburst galaxies if artificially shifted to high-z and observed with the facilities for high-z spectroscopy. These galaxies are true local counterparts of high-z post-starburst galaxies and the MaNGA IFU data provide spatially-resolved spectra for detailed investigation.

I will present the stellar age and the emission line maps, as well as the stellar kinematics of post-starburst galaxies. This information strongly suggests that post-starburst galaxies are the products of gas-rich minor mergers, which invoke intensive centrally-concentrated star-formation events then quenching. This mechanism derived from local post-starburst galaxies can also explain the observed properties of high-z post-starburst galaxies, suggest that high-z post-starburst galaxies are produced by the same mechanism. This work also demonstrates the prospect to use local IFU surveys as proxies for studying high-z galaxies.