Falling outer rotation curves of star-forming galaxies at 0.6 < z < 2.6 probed with KMOS^3D and SINS/ZC-SINF

Abstract

We exploit the deep resolved Halpha kinematic data from the KMOS^3D and SINS/zC-SINF surveys to examine the largely unexplored outer disk kinematics of star-forming galaxies (SFGs) out to the peak of cosmic star formation. Our sample contains 101 SFGs representative of the more massive (9.3 < log(M*/Msun) < 11.5) main sequence population at 0.6<z<2.6. Through a novel stacking approach we are able to constrain a representative rotation curve extending out to ~4 effective radii. This average rotation curve exhibits a significant drop in rotation velocity beyond the turnover, with a slope of Delta(V)/Delta(R) = $-0.26^{+0.10}_{-0.09}$ in units of normalized coordinates V/V_max and R/R_turn. This result confirms that the fall-off seen previously in some individual galaxies is a common feature of our sample of high-z disks. We show that this outer fall-off strikingly deviates from the flat or mildly rising rotation curves of local spiral galaxies of similar masses. We furthermore compare our data with models including baryons and dark matter demonstrating that the falling stacked rotation curve can be explained by a high mass fraction of baryons relative to the total dark matter halo (m_d>~0.05) in combination with a sizeable level of pressure support in the outer disk. These findings are in agreement with recent studies demonstrating that star-forming disks at high redshift are strongly baryon dominated within the disk scale, and furthermore suggest that pressure gradients caused by large turbulent gas motions are present even in their outer disks. We demonstrate that these results are largely independent of our model assumptions such as the presence of a central stellar bulge, the effect of adiabatic contraction at fixed m_d, and variations in the concentration parameter.