E-INSPIRE- I. Bridging the gap with the local Universe: stellar population of a statistical sample of ultra-compact massive galaxies at z < 0.3 - UTU Research Portal

A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

E-INSPIRE- I. Bridging the gap with the local Universe: stellar population of a statistical sample of ultra-compact massive galaxies at z < 0.3

Authors: Mills, John; Spiniello, Chiara; Sergeyev, Alexey; Tortora, Crescenzo; Khramtsov, Vladyslav; D'Ago, Giuseppe; Maksymowicz-Maciata, Michalina; Benedetti, Joao P., V; Ferre-Mateu, Anna; Cappellari, Michele; Davies, Roger; Hartke, Johanna; Rosen, Charles

Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PRESS

Publishing place: OXFORD

Publication year: 2025

Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Journal name in source: MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY

Journal acronym: MON NOT R ASTRON SOC

Volume: 541

Issue: 3

First page : 2440

Last page: 2458

Number of pages: 19

ISSN: 0035-8711

eISSN: 1365-2966

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf516

Web address : https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf516

Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/499401447

Abstract

This paper presents the first effort to Extend the Investigation of Stellar Populations In RElics (E-INSPIRE). We present a catalogue of 430 spectroscopically confirmed ultra-compact massive galaxies (UCMGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at redshifts 0.01 < z < 0.3. This increases the original INSPIRE sample eightfold, bridging the gap with the local Universe. For each object, we compute integrated stellar velocity dispersion, age, metallicity, and [Mg/Fe] through spectroscopic stellar population analysis. We infer star formation histories (SFHs), metallicity evolution histories (MEHs) and compute the Degree of Relicness (DoR) of each object. The UCMGs, covering a wide range of DoR from 0.05 to 0.88, can be divided into three groups, according to how extreme their SFH was. The first group consists of 81 extreme relics (DoR greater than or similar to 6) that have formed the totality of their stellar mass by and have super-solar metallicities at all cosmic epochs. The second group (0.3 less than or similar to DoR less than or similar to 0.6) contains 293 objects also characterized by peaked SFHs but with a small percentage of later-formed stars and with a variety of MEHs. The third group (DoR less than or similar to 0.3), has 56 objects that cannot be considered relics since they have extended SFHs and formed a non-negligible fraction (> 25 per cent) of their stellar mass at . We conclude that the most efficient method of finding relics is to select UCMGs with a combination of large velocity dispersion values (as already found by INSPIRE), super-solar metallicities and high [Mg/Fe]

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Funding information in the publication:
CS and CT acknowledge funding from the INAF PRIN-INAF 2020 programme 1.05.01.85.11. AFM has received support from RYC2021-031099-I and PID2021-123313NA-I00 of MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER,UE, NextGenerationEU/PRT. CT acknowledges the INAF grant 2022 LEMON. GD acknowledges support by UKRI-STFC grants: ST/T003081/1 and ST/X001857/1. JPVB received the support of a fellowship from the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation (ID 100010434). The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/DI23/11990084.