Star formation quenching, how fast and how frequently? Inside-out or not?

Star formation quenching is a critical process that drive galaxies evolving from blue star-forming to red passive stage. This rapid quenching process is necessary in galaxy evolution models to explain the galaxy distribution in NUV−optical colour-colour diagrams1,2 and the buildup of red-sequence from z = 1 to z = 03,4,5. Yet, the mechanism of this quenching process is not fully understood and is of hot debate. Many candidate scenarios, such as strangulation due to shock heating in massive halos, AGN feedback or gas stripping due to environmental effect, have been proposed. To differentiate these scenarios, more constraints on the quenching process and thus the potential physical mechanism are badly needed. The first result we show in this poster is the properties of quenching process we obtained from the galaxy distribution in NUV-optical colour-colour diagrams.

Aside from the unclear integrated star formation history (SFH) of galaxies, how the SFH of galaxies varies internally is still poorly understood. One direct probe of the internal variation of SFH is the spatial distribution of colours, i.e. the colour gradient. In the second part of the results of this poster, we explicitly illustrate the definition of ‘inside-out growth’ and ‘inside-out quenching’ scenarios and utilize the galaxy distribution in the u-I colour gradients to see which one is more observationally favoured.