A REMARKABLY LUMINOUS GALAXY AT Z = 11.1 MEASURED WITH HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE GRISM SPECTROSCOPY

By P. Oesch, G. Brammer, P. V. van Dokkum, G. Illingworth, R. Bouwens, I. Labbé, M. Franx, Ivelina G. Momcheva, M. Ashby, G. Fazio and 8 more. 2016

262 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present Hubble WFC3/IR slitless grism spectra of a remarkably bright z ≳ 10 galaxy candidate, GN-z11, identified initially from CANDELS/GOODS-N imaging data. A significant spectroscopic continuum break is detected at λ = 1.47 ± 0.01 &mgr; m ?> . The new grism data, combined with the photometric data, rule out all plausible lower redshift solutions for this source. The only viable solution is that this continuum break is the Lyα break redshifted to z grism = 11.09 − 0.12 + 0.08 ?> , just ∼400 Myr after the Big Bang. This observation extends the current spectroscopic frontier by 150 Myr to well before the Planck (instantaneous) cosmic reionization peak at z ∼ 8.8, demonstrating that galaxy build-up was well underway early in the reionization epoch at z > 10. GN-z11 is remarkably, and unexpectedly, luminous for a galaxy at such an early time: its UV luminosity is 3× larger than L * ?> measured at z ∼ 6−8. The Spitzer IRAC detections up to 4.5 μm of this galaxy are consistent with a stellar mass of ∼109 M⊙. This spectroscopic redshift measurement suggests that James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to similarly and easily confirm such sources at z > 10 and characterize their physical properties through detailed spectroscopy. Furthermore, WFIRST, with its wide-field near-IR imaging, would find large numbers of similar galaxies and contribute greatly to JWST's spectroscopy, if it is launched early enough to overlap with JWST.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8487a6cd05e031fafdc5b41b24299fdc74456b92

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

GALAXY PROPERTIES AND UV ESCAPE FRACTIONS DURING THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION: RESULTS FROM THE RENAISSANCE SIMULATIONS (2016, background): “The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) 2009 and 2012 campaigns (Ellis et al. 2013) can probe galaxies with rest-frame UV magnitude as low as approximately −18at z7 and as distant as z;11 (McLure et al. 2011; Zheng et al. 2012; Coe et al. 2013; Finkelstein et al. 2015; Oesch et al. 2016).”
The Dearth of z ∼ 10 Galaxies in All HST Legacy Fields—The Rapid Evolution of the Galaxy Population in the First 500 Myr (2017, background): “…(HST ) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) over the last few years, the exploration of galaxies has now reached z ∼ 10 − 12, less than 500 Myr after the Big Bang (e.g. Bouwens et al. 2011a, 2016b; Ellis et al. 2013; Coe et al. 2013; Oesch et al. 2014, 2016; McLeod et al. 2016; Ishigaki et al. 2017).”
Spectroscopic confirmation of four metal-poor galaxies at z = 10.3–13.2 (2022, background): “The highest redshift spectroscopically confirmed galaxy prior to these observations is that of GN-z11 at z=10.957 13,14 .”
The Frontier Fields: Survey Design and Initial Results (2016, background): “…current measurement of the cosmic star-formation history extends to less than 500 Myr after the Big Bang (e.g. Ellis et al. 2013; Finkelstein et al. 2015; Oesch et al. 2013; Oesch et al. 2016; but see Pirzkal et al. 2013, Brammer et al. 2013), albeit with very small numbers of candidates at z > 9.”
Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs). V. Quasar Luminosity Function and Contribution to Cosmic Reionization at z = 6 (2018, background): “A large number of high-z galaxies and galaxy candidates have been identified up to z ∼ 10 and beyond, and the evolution of the galaxy luminosity function (LF) has been intensively studied (e.g., Bouwens et al. 2011, 2015; McLeod et al. 2016; Oesch et al. 2016, 2018; Ishigaki et al. 2018).”
Evolution of the AGN UV luminosity function from redshift 7.5 (2018, background): “High-redshift galaxies down to rest-frame UV magnitude MUV = −12.5 at z = 6 (Livermore et al. 2017) and redshifts up to z = 11.1 (Oesch et al. 2016) have now been reported.”
Detection of the Far-infrared [O iii] and Dust Emission in a Galaxy at Redshift 8.312: Early Metal Enrichment in the Heart of the Reionization Era (2018, background): “…(Planck Collaboration et al. 2018), and the latest Hubble Space Telescope (HST) surveys have revealed more than a hundred candidate z8 Lyman break galaxies (LBGs, e.g., Bouwens et al. 2015; Ishigaki et al. 2018; see Stark 2016 for a review) out to = - +z 11.1 0.12 0.08 (Oesch et al. 2016).”