English

REQUIEM-2D: Spatially Resolved Stellar Populations from HST 2D Grism Spectroscopy

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-04-05 v1

Abstract

We present a novel Bayesian methodology to jointly model photometry and deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) 2d grism spectroscopy of high-redshift galaxies. Our requiem2d code measures both unresolved and resolved stellar populations, ages, and star-formation histories (SFHs) for the ongoing REQIUEM (REsolving QUIEscent Magnified) Galaxies Survey, which targets strong gravitationally lensed quiescent galaxies at z~2. We test the accuracy of \texttt{requiem2d} using a simulated sample of massive galaxies at z~2 from the Illustris cosmological simulation and find we recover the general trends in SFH and median stellar ages. We further present a pilot study for the REQUIEM Galaxies Survey: MRG-S0851, a quintuply-imaged, massive (logM/M=11.02±0.04\log M_* / M_\odot = 11.02 \pm 0.04) red galaxy at z=1.883±0.001z=1.883\pm 0.001. With an estimated gravitational magnification of μ=5.70.2+0.4\mu = 5.7^{+0.4}_{-0.2}, we sample the stellar populations on 0.6 kpc physical size bins. The global mass-weighted median age is constrained to be 1.80.2+0.31.8_{-0.2}^{+0.3} Gyr, and our spatially resolved analysis reveals that MRG-S0851 has a flat age gradient in the inner 3 kpc core after taking into account the subtle effects of dust and metallicity on age measurements, favoring an early formation scenario. The analysis for the full REQUIEM-2D sample will be presented in a forthcoming paper with a beta-release of the requiem2d code.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.02276,
  title  = {REQUIEM-2D: Spatially Resolved Stellar Populations from HST 2D Grism Spectroscopy},
  author = {Mohammad Akhshik and Katherine E. Whitaker and Gabriel Brammer and Guillaume Mahler and Keren Sharon and Joel Leja and Matthew B. Bayliss and Rachel Bezanson and Michael D. Gladders and Allison Man and Erica J. Nelson and Jane R. Rigby and Francesca Rizzo and Sune Toft and Sarah Wellons and Christina C. Williams},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.02276},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

29 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ