Speaker
Description
One of the most remarkable discoveries in extra-galactic astronomy from the past two decades is the existence of a population of quiescent galaxies at z ~ 2 and beyond. Observations have shown that compared to their local counterparts, these distant quiescent galaxies have lower metallicities, and have rotating disc structures similar to star-forming galaxies. These results challenge our models for the formation and subsequent evolution of high-z quiescent galaxies. However, pre-JWST it was extremely challenging to obtain deep, high-resolution spectra for these systems, leading to small sample sizes and a limited understanding of the properties of the population. In this talk, I will present the first results from our JWST SUSPENSE program, which obtained ultra-deep high-resolution spectra for a sample of 20 quiescent galaxies at z=1-3. We obtain detailed star-formation histories for these galaxies, which show that distant quiescent galaxies form earlier and over shorter star-formation timescales compared to low redshifts. When combining this with preliminary results from the kinematic en structural properties of our sample, our findings indicate that rotating disc structures are not destroyed in the formation of distant quiescent galaxies. Instead, we find that quenching at high z does not lead to big structural changes in the galaxy, challenging current models for star-formation quenching.
