Observations of massive, quiescent galaxies reveal a relatively uniform evolution: following prolific star formation in the early universe, these galaxies quench and transition to their characteristic quiescent state in the local universe. The debate on the relative role and frequency of the process(es) driving this evolution is robust. In this letter, we identify 0.5<z<1.5 massive, quiescent galaxies in the HST/UVCANDELS extragalactic deep fields using traditional color selection methods and model their spectral energy distributions, which incorporates novel UV images. This analysis reveals ~15% of massive, quiescent galaxies have experienced minor, recent star formation(<10% of total stellar mass within the past ~1Gyr). We find only a marginal, positive correlation between the probability for recent star formation and a measure of the richness of the local environment from a statistical analysis. Assuming the recent star formation present in these quiescent galaxies is physically linked to the local environment, these results suggest only a minor role for dynamic external processes (galaxy mergers and interactions) in the formation and evolution of these galaxies at this redshift.
@article{arxiv.2504.05511,
title = {Recent star formation in 0.5<z<1.5 quiescent galaxies},
author = {Michael J. Rutkowski and Bonnabelle Zabelle and Tyler Hagen and Seth Cohen and Christopher Conselice and Norman Grogin and Yicheng Guo and Matthew Hayes and Sugata Kaviraj and Anton Koekemoer and Ray A. Lucas and Kameswara Bharadwaj Mantha and Alec Martin and Vihang Mehta and Bahram Mobasher and Nimish Hathi and Kalina V. Nedkova and Robert O'Connell and Marc Rafelski and Claudia Scarlata and Harry I. Teplitz and Xin Wang and Rogier Windhorst and Aaron Yung and the UVCANDELS Team},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05511},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted to ApJ Letters; updated author affilations