What is the True HI Gas Content in Massive Quiescent Galaxies in the Local Universe?

Abstract

While massive quiescent galaxies are known to be poor in atomic hydrogen (HI), their true HI content remains poorly constrained due to the limited sensitivity and morphological biases of existing surveys. We present deep HI observations using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) for a representative sample of 78 low-redshift massive quiescent galaxies, selected by stellar mass ($M_\ast > 10^{10} M_\odot$), color (NUV$-r > 5$), and specific star formation rate ($\rm \log sSFR < -11\ yr^{-1}$). Our observations reach a remarkable sensitivity of $\log(M_{HI}/M_\ast) = -2.6$ for 55 targets and $\log(M_{HI}/M_\ast) = -3.2$ for 23 targets. We find that one-third of the sample follows the HI scaling relation derived from previous surveys, while the remaining two-thirds exhibit significantly lower HI content. The HI mass fraction shows no clear correlation with specific star formation rate, NUV$-r$ color index, stellar surface mass density, and concentration. Our FAST sample shows remarkable similarity to the $ATLAS^{3D}$ sample which only includes early-type galaxies, both in its high fraction of HI-poor galaxies and its high satellite fraction among HI-poor galaxies. These results suggest that while both early-type morphology and environment may contribute to the extreme HI deficiency, neither factor alone fully explains the observed gas depletion, indicating that additional physical mechanisms must be responsible for the extreme HI deficiency prevalent in massive quiescent galaxies.