Evidence of Extended Dust and Feedback around z ≈ 1 Quiescent Galaxies via Millimeter Observations

Abstract

We use public data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) and Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) to measure the radial profiles of the thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect and dust emission around massive quiescent galaxies at z ≈ 1. Using survey data from the Dark Energy Survey and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, we selected 387,627 quiescent galaxies within the ACT field, with a mean stellar log 10 ( M ⋆ / M ⊙ ) of 11.40. A subset of 94,452 galaxies, with a mean stellar log 10 ( M ⋆ / M ⊙ ) of 11.36, are also covered by SPT. In 0 .′ 5 bins around these galaxies, we detect the tSZ profile at levels up to 11 σ , and dust profile up to 20 σ . Both profiles are extended, and the dust profile slope at large radii is consistent with galaxy clustering. We analyze the thermal energy and dust mass versus stellar mass via integration within R = 2 .′ 0 circular apertures and fit them with a forward-modeled power law to correct for our photometric stellar mass uncertainties. At the mean log stellar mass of our Overlap and Wide-Area Samples, respectively, we extract thermal energies from the tSZ of E pk = 6.45 − 1.52 + 1.67 × 10 60 erg and 8.20 − 0.52 + 0.52 × 10 60 erg , most consistent with moderate to high levels of active galactic nucleus feedback acting upon the circumgalactic medium. Dust masses at the mean log stellar mass are M d , pk = 6.23 − 0.67 + 0.67 × 10 8 M ⊙ and 6.76 − 0.56 + 0.56 × 10 8 M ⊙ , respectively, and we find a greater than linear dust-to-stellar mass relation, which indicates that the more-massive galaxies in our study retain more dust. Our work highlights the current capabilities of stacking millimeter data around individual galaxies and their potential for future use.