Discovery and properties of ultra-high redshift galaxies (9 < z < 12) in the JWST ERO SMACS 0723 Field

By N. Adams, Christopher J. Conselice, L. Ferreira, D. Austin, J. Trussler, I. Juodžbalis, S. Wilkins, J. Caruana, P. Dayal, A. Verma and 1 more. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2022

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We present a reduction and analysis of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) SMACS 0723 field using new post-launch calibrations to conduct a search for ultra-high-redshift galaxies (z > 9) present within the Epoch of Reionisation. We conduct this search by modelling photometric redshifts in several ways for all sources and by applying conservative magnitude cuts (mF200W < 28) to identify strong Lyman breaks greater than 1 magnitude. We find four z > 9 candidate galaxies which have not previously been identified, with one object at z = 11.5, and another which is possibly a close pair of galaxies. We measure redshifts for candidate galaxies from other studies and find the recovery rate to be only 23 per cent, with many being assigned lower redshift, dusty solutions in our work. Most of our z > 9 sample show evidence for Balmer-breaks, or extreme emission lines from Hβ and [OIII], demonstrating that the stellar populations could be advanced in age or very young depending on the cause of the F444W excess. We discuss the resolved structures of these early galaxies and find that the Sérsic indices reveal a mixture of light concentration levels, but that the sizes of all our systems are exceptionally small (<0.5 kpc). These systems have stellar masses M* ∼ 109.0 M⊙, with our z ∼ 11.5 candidate a dwarf galaxy with a stellar mass M* ∼ 107.8 – 108.2 M⊙. These candidate ultra high-redshift galaxies are excellent targets for future NIRSpec observations aimed to better understand their physical nature.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4c0867256b35b8ebdb3237106c831b78810c1e0

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Citations in the corpus

CEERS Key Paper. I. An Early Look into the First 500 Myr of Galaxy Formation with JWST (2022, methodology): “…science data were released, several papers were submitted discussing not only the detection of objects at the expected redshifts of z∼ 10–11 (e.g., Adams et al. 2022; Castellano et al. 2022; Labbe et al. 2022; Naidu et al. 2022b; Whitler et al. 2023) but some candidates at z∼ 12–17 (e.g.,…”
On the stunning abundance of super-early, luminous galaxies revealed by JWST (2022, methodology): “Finally, the galaxy 10234 at z = 11.49 found by Adams et al. (2022) in the ERO SMACS 0723 field, is the bluest (with a striking β ≈ −3.35) among the four z > 9 candidates.”