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Building the red sequence through gas-rich major mergers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Vivienne Wild ,
C. Jakob Walcher  and
Peter H. Johansson
Vivienne Wild
Affiliation:
Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS, Université Pierre & Marie Curie, UMR 7095, 98bis bd Arago, 75014 Paris, France. email: wild@iap.fr
C. Jakob Walcher
Affiliation:
European Space Agency, Keplerlaan 1, 2200AG Noordwijk, The Netherlands
Peter H. Johansson
Affiliation:
Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Scheinerstr. 1, D-81679 München, Germany
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Abstract

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Understanding the details of how the red sequence is built is a key question in galaxy evolution. What are the relative roles of gas-rich vs. dry mergers, major vs. minor mergers or galaxy mergers vs. gas accretion? In a recent paper (Wild et al. 2009), we compare hydrodynamic simulations with observations to show how gas-rich major mergers result in galaxies with strong post-starburst spectral features, a population of galaxies easily identified in the real Universe using optical spectra. Using spectra from the VVDS deep survey with <z> = 0.7, and a principal component analysis technique to provide indices with high enough SNR, we find that 40% of the mass flux onto the red-sequence could enter through a strong post-starburst phase, and thus through gas-rich major mergers. The deeper samples provided by next generation galaxy redshift surveys will allow us to observe the primary physical processes responsible for the shut-down in starformation and build-up of the red sequence.

Keywords

galaxies: stellar contentstarburstinteractionssurveys
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 5 , Symposium S262: Stellar Populations – Planning for the Next Decade , August 2009 , pp. 225 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2010

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