Characterisation of our sample of A³COSMOS/A³GOODSS QGs and the parent sample. Top panel: Time since quenching as a function of the observed redshift. The median error is shown on the right. Solid black lines indicate the locus of galaxies that quenched at the same time, from z_q = 0.5 to 5 in steps of 0.5. The orange density map shows the distribution of the parent sample galaxies. The grey shaded areas in the background and dashed grey lines indicate the bins of quenching redshift and time since quenching used in Sect. 4.3. Middle panel: Distribution of quenching redshift (z_q). Bottom panel: Fraction of recently quenched galaxies (t_q ≤ 500 Myr). The points and horizontal error bars denote the median redshift and the 16th and 84th percentiles of all galaxies in each bin, respectively. The black line shows the fraction of recently quenched massive early-type galaxies as a function of redshift from Gobat et al. (2020). The dotted blue line and shaded area show our toy model based on the stellar mass functions of Davidzon et al. (2017).