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Context. Red nuggets are a rare population of passive compact massive galaxies thought to be the first massive galaxies that formed in the Universe. First found at z ∼ 3, they are even less abundant at lower redshifts, and it is believed that with time they mostly transformed through mergers into today’s giant ellipticals. The red nuggets that managed to escape this fate can serve as unique laboratories to study the early evolution of massive galaxies. Aims. In this paper we aim to make use of the unprecedented statistical power of the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey to build the largest up-to-date catalogue of spectroscopically confirmed red nuggets at the intermediate redshift 0.5 8 × 10 10 M ⊙ and effective radii R e 2. It fills the gap at intermediate redshift. Conclusions. A catalogue of red nuggets presented in this paper is a golden sample for future studies of this rare population of objects at intermediate redshift. In addition to covering a unique redshift range and careful selection of galaxies, the catalogue is spectroscopically identified.
Lisiecki et al. (Fri,) studied this question.