Sleep research article
Sleeping or Dead? Probing the Quenching Mechanism of JWST Dormant Galaxies at z > 3 with ALMA
Authors: Mengyuan Xiao , Songnan Qi , Pascal A. Oesch , Longji Bing , Miroslava Dessauges-Zavadsky , Andreas L. Faisst , Mahsa Sanati , Rashmi Gottumukkala , Gabriel Brammer , David Elbaz , Robert Feldmann , Yoshinobu Fudamoto , Lucas C. Kimmig , Benjamin Magnelli , Rui Marques-Chaves , Anurag Amol Sawarkar , Sune Toft , Francesco Valentino , Christina C. Williams
One-line summary
A sleep science research article on Sleeping or Dead? Probing the Quenching Mechanism of JWST Dormant Galaxies at z > 3 with ALMA.
Sleep health notes
Sleep health notes will be added by the Sleepatch editorial team.
中文解读
中文解读待补充：本站会优先为失眠研究、睡眠质量改善、昼夜节律等高价值睡眠研究添加中文说明。
Original abstract
JWST has revealed a population of "dormant'' galaxies at z>3 with strong Balmer breaks and weak emission lines, whose star formation appears to have declined only recently. Whether these galaxies are undergoing a lasting transition toward quiescence or merely experiencing a temporary suppression of star formation remains unclear. We investigate their molecular gas content using archival ALMA observations of [CII]158um and CO rotational transitions. Starting from all publicly available JWST/NIRSpec prism observations and using joint spectrophotometric fitting, we construct a parent sample at z>3 and log(Mstar/Msun)>9.5 in the ALMA-accessible COSMOS, UDS, and GOODS-South fields. Our final sample comprises 7 dormant galaxies and 15 quiescent galaxies with ALMA constraints on their molecular gas content (mostly 3 sigma upper limits). We find that dormant galaxies exhibit systematically lower star formation rates averaged over the past 10Myr (SFR10Myr) than over the past 100Myr (SFR100Myr), supporting a recent rapid decline in their star formation. For the ~70% of the sample with sufficiently constraining ALMA observations, their molecular gas fractions lie at least ~0.3-2dex below those expected for main-sequence galaxies. Moreover, the molecular gas fractions of dormant galaxies show no systematic difference from those of quiescent galaxies in our sample. This indicates that dormant galaxies have already reached a gas-poor state shortly after quenching and favors a scenario in which the rapid shutdown of star formation is associated with depletion or removal of the molecular gas reservoir, rather than primarily with suppressed star formation efficiency while retaining a substantial molecular gas reservoir. Our results suggest that, if no substantial gas replenishment occurs in the future, dormant galaxies are more consistent with becoming "dead'' than with being temporarily "sleeping''.
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