Modelling the emission of passive galaxy candidates at z∼3

Early-type galaxies (ETGs) are of crucial importance to trace back the galaxy mass assembly across cosmic time, yet their formation and quenching remain remarkably elusive. The discoveries of massive, dead galaxies at ever-growing redshifts provided compelling evidence to push their formation up to redshift > 4–5 when the Universe was barely 1 Gyr old. In this talk I will present our results on the ages of a new sample of ETGs at z ∼ 3, built by exploiting HST WFC3/G141 rest-frame optical/near-UV grism spectroscopy to study the nature of 10 passive galaxy candidates at 2.5 < z < 3.5 in COSMOS.This work is part of a PhD project aimed at quantifying the parent space density of distant genuine passive galaxies. I will also discuss the importance of multi-wavelength data in clarifying the degree of contamination by dusty star-forming galaxies affecting the color selection.