Highlights of Spanish Astrophysics VIII, Proceedings of the XI Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society held on September 8–12, 2014, in Teruel, Spain. A. J. Cenarro, F. Figueras, C. Hernández-­‐Monteagudo, J. Trujillo Bueno, and L. Valdivielso (eds.) Building an unbiased sample of quiescent galaxies
up to z = 2.5 based on the Mg(UV) absorption index
Helena Domı́nguez-Sánchez1 , M. Carmen Eliche-Moral1 ,
Pablo G. Pérez-González1 , Pilar Esquej1 , BelénAlcalde-Pampliega1 , and the
SHARDS Team
1
Departamento de Astrofı́sica, Facultad de CC. Fı́sicas, Universidad Complutense de
Madrid, E-28040 Madrid, Spain
Abstract
Samples of “red & dead” galaxies selected through traditional color-based techniques usually
suffer from contamination by strongly dust obscured sources. We are using GTC/OSIRIS
data from the SHARDS project on the GOODSN field to define unbiased samples of really
quiescent massive galaxies at different redshifts up to z = 2.5. By measuring the Mg(UV)
absorption index in the pseudo-spectra of these galaxies, we intend to determine the redshift
evolution of the characteristic age of their stellar populations to shed some light into their
assembly epoch.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge support from the Spanish Programa Nacional de Astronomı́a y Astrofı́sica under grant
AYA2012-31277. SHARDS has been funded by the Spanish MICINN/MINECO under the ConsoliderIngenio 2010 Program grant CSD2006-00070: First Science with the GTC. This work has made use
of the Rainbow Cosmological Surveys Database, which is operated by the Universidad Complutense
de Madrid (UCM). Based on observations made with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), installed
at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofı́sica de Canarias,
in the island of La Palma (Spain).
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