Lectures October 2014 Vol. I, No.

Red Spiral Galaxies

Jeffrey Barcenas
Instituto de Astronomia, UNAM
jbarcenas@astro.unam.mx
Abstract
In this paper, we take a look at the most crucial event in the life of a galaxy: the end of star formation.
We often call this process "quenching" and many astrophysicists have slightly different definitions of
quenching. Galaxies are the place where cosmic gas condenses and, if it gets cold and dense enough, turns
into stars. The resulting stars are what we really see as traditional optical astronomers.

I.

Introduction

Not all stars shine the same way though: stars

much more massive than our sun are very
bright and shine in a blue light as they are
very hot. Theyre also very short-lived. Lower
mass stars take a more leisurely pace and dont
shine as bright (theyre not as hot). This is why
star-forming galaxies are blue, and quiescent
galaxies (or "quenched" galaxies) are red: once
star formation stops, the bluest stars die first
and arent replaced with new ones, so they
leave behind only the longer-lived red stars for
us to observe as the galaxy passively evolves.
The received wisdom in galaxy evolution
had been that spirals are blue, and ellipticals
are red, meaning that spirals form new stars (or
rather: convert gas into stars) and ellipticals do
not form new stars (they have no gas to convert
to stars) and in this paper they help us piece together how, why and when galaxies shut down
their star formation. You can already conclude
from the fact that blue ellipticals and red spirals exist that there is no one-to-one correlation
between a galaxys morphology and whether
or not its forming stars.
A few years back, astronomers noticed that
not all galaxies are either blue and star forming
or red and dead. There was a smaller population of galaxies in between those two, which
they termed the "green valley". So how do
these "green" galaxies fit in? The natural con-

clusion was that these "in between" galaxies

are the ones who are in the process of shutting
down their star formation. Theyre the galaxies
which are in the process of quenching. Their
star formation rate is dropping, which is why
they have fewer and fewer young blue stars.
With time, star formation should cease entirely
and galaxies would become red and dead.
So, we have both green spirals and green ellipticals. First: how do we know they must be
doing very different things? If you look at the
colour-mass diagram of only spirals and only
ellipticals, we start to get some hints. Most
ellipticals are red. A small number are blue,
and a small number are green. If the blue ellipticals turn green and then red, they must do
so quickly, or there would be far more green
ellipticals. There would be a traffic jam in the
green valley. So we suspect that quenching
S the end of star formation A
S in ellipticals
A
happens quickly.
In the case of spirals, we see lots of blue
ones, quite a few green one and then red ones.
If spirals slowly turn red, we expect them to
start bunching up in the middle: the green
"valley" which is revealed to be no such thing
amongst spirals.
We can confirm this difference in quenching time scales by looking at the ultraviolet and
optical colours of spirals and ellipticals in the
green valley. What we see is that spirals start
becoming redder in optical colours as their star

Lectures October 2014 Vol. I, No. 1

formation rate goes down, but they are still

blue in the ultraviolet. Why? Because they
are still forming at least some new stars and
they are extremely bright and so blue that they
emit a LOT of ultraviolet light. So even as the
overall population of young stars declines, the
galaxy is still blue in the UV.
Ellipticals, on the other hand, are much
redder in the UV. This is because their star
formation rate isnt dropping slowly over time
like the spirals, but rather goes to zero in a very
short time. So, as the stellar populations age
and become redder, NO new stars are added
and the UV colour goes red.
Galaxies form stars because they have gas.
This gas comes in from their cosmological surroundings, cools down into a disk and then
turns into stars. Galaxies thus have a cosmological supply and a reservoir of gas (the disk).
We also know observationally that gas turns
into stars according to a specific recipe, the
Schmidt-Kennicutt law. Basically that law says
that in any dynamical time (the characteristic
time scale of the gas disk), a small fraction
(around 2) of that gas turns into stars. Star
formation is a rather inefficient process. With
this in mind, we can explain the behaviour of
ellipticals and spirals in terms of what happens
to their gas.
Spirals quench their star formation slowly
over maybe a billion years or more. This can
be explained by simply shutting off the cosmological supply of gas. The spiral is still left
with its gas reservoir in the disk to form stars
with. As time goes on, more and more of the
gas is used up, and the star formation rate
drops. Eventually, almost no gas is left and the

originally blue spiral bursting with blue young

stars has fewer and fewer young stars and so
turns green and eventually red. That means
spirals are a bit like zombies. Something shuts
off their supply of gas. Theyre already dead.
But they have their gas reservoir, so they keep
Zre

moving, moving not knowing that theyA

already doomed.
The ellipticals on the other hand quench
their star formation really fast. That means its
not enough to just shut off the gas supply, you
also have to remove the gas reservoir in the
Zre
not
galaxy. How do you do that? WeA
really sure, but its suspicious that most blue
ellipticals look like they recently experienced a
major galaxy merger. There are also hints that
their black holes are feeding, so its possible
an energetic outburst from their central black
holes heated and ejected their gas reservoir in
a short episode. But we dont know for sure.

II.
III.
IV.
I.
II.

Methods
Results
Discussion

Subsection One
Subsection Two
References

[Figueredo and Wolf, 2009] Figueredo, A. J.

and Wolf, P. S. A. (2009). Assortative
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