Two new confirmed massive relic galaxies: Red nuggets in the present-day Universe

We confirm two new local massive relic galaxies, i.e. untouched survivors of the early Universe massive population: Mrk 1216 and PGC 032873. Both show early and peaked formation events within very short time-scales (< 1 Gyr) and thus old mean mass-weighted ages (~13 Gyr). Their star formation histories remain virtually unchanged out to several effective radii, even when considering the steeper initial-mass-function values inferred out to ~3 effective radii. Their morphologies, kinematics and density profiles are like those found in the z > 2 massive population, setting them apart from the typical z ~ 0 massive early-type galaxies. We find that there seems to exist a degree of relic that is related to how far into the path, to become one of these typical z ~ 0 massive galaxies, the compact relic has moved. This path is partly dictated by the environment the galaxy lives in. For galaxies in rich environments, such as the previously reported relic galaxy NGC 1277, the most extreme properties (e.g. sizes, short formation time-scales, larger supermassive black holes) are expected, while lower density environments will have galaxies with delayed and/or extended star formations, slightly larger sizes and not that extreme black hole masses. The confirmation of three relic galaxies up to a distance of 106 Mpc, implies a lower limit in the number density of these red nuggets in the local Universe of 6 × 10-7 Mpc3, which is within the theoretical expectations.