Spectroscopic confirmation of four metal-poor galaxies at z = 10.3–13.2

By E. Curtis-Lake, S. Carniani, A. Cameron, S. Charlot, P. Jakobsen, R. Maiolino, A. Bunker, J. Witstok, R. Smit, J. Chevallard and 49 more. Nature Astronomy, 2022

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As part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), NIRSpec has spectroscopically confirmed four young and metal-poor galaxies at redshift 10.3–13.2, from an early epoch of galaxy formation. Finding and characterizing the first galaxies that illuminated the early universe at cosmic dawn is pivotal to understand the physical conditions and the processes that led to the formation of the first stars. In the first few months of operations, imaging from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been used to identify tens of candidates of galaxies at redshift ( z ) greater than 10, less than 450 million years after the Big Bang. However, none of such candidates has yet been confirmed spectroscopically, leaving open the possibility that they are actually low-redshift interlopers. Here we present spectroscopic confirmation and analysis of four galaxies unambiguously detected at redshift 10.3 ≤ z ≤ 13.2, previously selected from JWST Near Infrared Camera imaging. The spectra reveal that these primeval galaxies are metal poor, have masses on the order of about 10^7–10^8 solar masses and young ages. The damping wings that shape the continuum close to the Lyman edge provide constraints on the neutral hydrogen fraction of the intergalactic medium from normal star-forming galaxies. These findings demonstrate the rapid emergence of the first generations of galaxies at cosmic dawn.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d0d88e58ba88cfe63e3c3290b7669046e10213c

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Citations in the corpus

JADES Initial Data Release for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: Revealing the Faint Infrared Sky with Deep JWST NIRCam Imaging (2023, background): “The ﬁ rst year of the mission has revealed high-redshift galaxies as never before possible ( Robertson et al. 2023; Curtis-Lake et al. 2023 ) .”
JWST Census for the Mass–Metallicity Star Formation Relations at z = 4–10 with Self-consistent Flux Calibration and Proper Metallicity Calibrators (2023, background): “…Time ( DDT ) programs ( Heintz et al. 2022; Wang et al. 2022; Langeroodi et al. 2022; Williams et al. 2023 ) , and the Guaranteed Time Observations of JADES ( Bunker et al. 2023; Cameron et al. 2023b; Curtis-Lake et al. 2023; Robertson et al. 2023; Saxena et al. 2023; Curti et al. 2023b ) .”
A Census of Photometrically Selected Little Red Dots at 4 < z < 9 in JWST Blank Fields (2024, background): “…of more and farther galaxies (e.g. Adams et al. 2023; Atek et al. 2023; Austin et al. 2023; Bradley et al. 2023; Casey et al. 2023; Finkelstein et al. 2023; Naidu et al. 2022; Robertson et al. 2023), some of them spectroscopically confirmed beyond z > 13 (Curtis-Lake et al. 2023; Wang et al. 2023).”
The James Webb Space Telescope Mission (2023, background): “JWST has begun to address questions 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…”
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): “…used templates ( e.g., Arrabal Haro et al. 2023a ) , the Ly α damping wing from an increasingly neutral IGM ( e.g., Arrabal Haro et al. 2023a; Curtis-Lake et al. 2023; Umeda et al. 2023 ) , and / or extremely dense line-of-sight damped Ly α systems in close proximity to a given galaxy (…”