CEERS Key Paper. I. An Early Look into the First 500 Myr of Galaxy Formation with JWST

By S. Finkelstein, M. Bagley, H. Ferguson, S. Wilkins, J. Kartaltepe, C. Papovich, L. Y. Aaron Yung, P. Haro, P. Behroozi, Mark Dickinson and 57 more. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2022

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We present an investigation into the first 500 Myr of galaxy evolution from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey. CEERS, one of 13 JWST ERS programs, targets galaxy formation from z ∼ 0.5 to >10 using several imaging and spectroscopic modes. We make use of the first epoch of CEERS NIRCam imaging, spanning 35.5 arcmin2, to search for candidate galaxies at z > 9. Following a detailed data reduction process implementing several custom steps to produce high-quality reduced images, we perform multiband photometry across seven NIRCam broad- and medium-band (and six Hubble broadband) filters focusing on robust colors and accurate total fluxes. We measure photometric redshifts and devise a robust set of selection criteria to identify a sample of 26 galaxy candidates at z ∼ 9–16. These objects are compact with a median half-light radius of ∼0.5 kpc. We present an early estimate of the z ∼ 11 rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) luminosity function, finding that the number density of galaxies at M UV ∼ −20 appears to evolve very little from z ∼ 9 to 11. We also find that the abundance (surface density [arcmin−2]) of our candidates exceeds nearly all theoretical predictions. We explore potential implications, including that at z > 10, star formation may be dominated by top-heavy initial mass functions, which would result in an increased ratio of UV light per unit halo mass, though a complete lack of dust attenuation and/or changing star formation physics may also play a role. While spectroscopic confirmation of these sources is urgently required, our results suggest that the deeper views to come with JWST should yield prolific samples of ultrahigh-redshift galaxies with which to further explore these conclusions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c333137a7b5e8cd30847cbd53294c935045bd44

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Citations in the corpus

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission (2023, background): “…of the first galaxies and reionization by measuring spectroscopic redshifts of metal-poor galaxies beyond z> 13 (Curtis-Lake et al. 2023), detecting multiple emission lines in a galaxy at z= 10.6 (Bunker et al. 2023), and measuring galaxy luminosity functions at z> 7 (Finkelstein et al. 2023).”
JWST CEERS and JADES Active Galaxies at z = 4–7 Violate the Local M •–M ⋆ Relation at >3σ: Implications for Low-mass Black Holes and Seeding Models (2023, background): “…by Harikane et al. (2023a), obtained from the Early Release Observations (Pon-toppidan et al. 2022), which targeted the SMACS 0723 field, the Early Release Science observations of GLASS (Treu et al. 2022), and the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS, Finkelstein et al. 2023).”
The Complete CEERS Early Universe Galaxy Sample: A Surprisingly Slow Evolution of the Space Density of Bright Galaxies at z ∼ 8.5–14.5 (2023, methodology): “While some early results changed owing to the uncertain characterization of the NIRCam photometric zero-point ( Boyer et al. 2022 ) , within a few months more robust samples of galaxies were in place ( e.g., Harikane et al. 2023a; Finkelstein et al. 2023; McLeod et al. 2024 ) .”
JWST Census for the Mass–Metallicity Star Formation Relations at z = 4–10 with Self-consistent Flux Calibration and Proper Metallicity Calibrators (2023, methodology): “The ERS CEERS NIRSpec MSA observations were carried out on UT 2022 December 20 – 22 and 24 in the blank ﬁ eld of EGS ( Finkelstein et al. 2023; Fujimoto et al. 2023; Proposal ID: 1345 ) .”