Rapid Quenching of Galaxies at Cosmic Noon

Understand

The existence of massive quiescent galaxies at high redshift seems to require rapid quenching, but it is unclear whether all quiescent galaxies have gone through this phase and what physical mechanisms are involved.

• To study rapid quenching, we use rest-frame colors to select 12 young quiescent galaxies at $z \sim 1.5$.
• From spectral energy distribution fitting, we find that they all experienced intense starbursts prior to rapid quenching.
• We confirm this with deep Magellan/FIRE spectroscopic observations for a subset of seven galaxies.