Bulge-forming Galaxies with an Extended Rotating Disk at z ~ 2
Übler, Hannah; Tamura, Yoichi; Kohno, Kotaro; Belli, Sirio; Suzuki, Tomoko L.; Koyama, Yusei; Kodama, Tadayuki; Hayashi, Masao; Shimakawa, Rhythm; Tanaka, Ichi; Tadaki, Ken-ichi; Mendel, J. Trevor; Wuyts, Stijn; Hatsukade, Bunyo; Förster Schreiber, Natascha M.; Herrera-Camus, Rodrigo; Lutz, Dieter; Nakanishi, Kouichiro; Inoue, Shigeki; Burkert, Andreas; Lang, Philipp; Wisnioski, Emily; Genzel, Reinhard; Tacconi, Linda J.; Ikarashi, Soh; Davies, Richard I.; Wilman, Dave J.
Germany, United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Netherlands
Abstract
We present 0.″2-resolution Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observations at 870 μm for 25 Hα-seleced star-forming galaxies around the main sequence at z = 2.2-2.5. We detect significant 870 μm continuum emission in 16 (64%) of these galaxies. The high-resolution maps reveal that the dust emission is mostly radiated from a single region close to the galaxy center. Exploiting the visibility data taken over a wide uv distance range, we measure the half-light radii of the rest-frame far-infrared emission for the best sample of 12 massive galaxies with log(M*/M⊙) > 11. We find nine galaxies to be associated with extremely compact dust emission with R1/2,870 μm < 1.5 kpc, which is more than a factor of 2 smaller than their rest-optical sizes, < {R}1/2,1.6μ {{m}}> =3.2 {kpc}, and is comparable with optical sizes of massive quiescent galaxies at similar redshifts. As they have an exponential disk with Sérsic index of < {n}1.6μ {{m}}> =1.2 in the rest-optical, they are likely to be in the transition phase from extended disks to compact spheroids. Given their high star formation rate surface densities within the central 1 kpc of < {{Σ }}{{SFR}}1{kpc}> =40 M⊙ yr-1 kpc-2, the intense circumnuclear starbursts can rapidly build up a central bulge with ΣM*,1 kpc > 1010 M⊙ kpc-2 in several hundred megayears, I.e., by z ∼ 2. Moreover, ionized gas kinematics reveal that they are rotation supported with an angular momentum as large as that of typical star-forming galaxies at z = 1-3. Our results suggest that bulges are commonly formed in extended rotating disks by internal processes, not involving major mergers.