Two Remarkably Luminous Galaxy Candidates at z ≈ 10–12 Revealed by JWST

By R. Naidu, P. Oesch, P. V. van Dokkum, E. Nelson, K. Suess, G. Brammer, K. Whitaker, G. Illingworth, R. Bouwens, S. Tacchella and 15 more. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2022

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The first few 100 Myr at z > 10 mark the last major uncharted epoch in the history of the universe, where only a single galaxy (GN-z11 at z ≈ 11) is currently spectroscopically confirmed. Here we present a search for luminous z > 10 galaxies with JWST/NIRCam photometry spanning ≈1–5 μm and covering 49 arcmin2 from the public JWST Early Release Science programs (CEERS and GLASS). Our most secure candidates are two M UV ≈ −21 systems: GLASS-z12 and GLASS-z10. These galaxies display abrupt ≳1.8 mag breaks in their spectral energy distributions (SEDs), consistent with complete absorption of flux bluewards of Lyα that is redshifted to z=12.4−0.3+0.1 and z=10.4−0.5+0.4 . Lower redshift interlopers such as quiescent galaxies with strong Balmer breaks would be comfortably detected at >5σ in multiple bands where instead we find no flux. From SED modeling we infer that these galaxies have already built up ∼109 solar masses in stars over the ≲300–400 Myr after the Big Bang. The brightness of these sources enable morphological constraints. Tantalizingly, GLASS-z10 shows a clearly extended exponential light profile, potentially consistent with a disk galaxy of r 50 ≈ 0.7 kpc. These sources, if confirmed, join GN-z11 in defying number density forecasts for luminous galaxies based on Schechter UV luminosity functions, which require a survey area >10× larger than we have studied here to find such luminous sources at such high redshifts. They extend evidence from lower redshifts for little or no evolution in the bright end of the UV luminosity function into the cosmic dawn epoch, with implications for just how early these galaxies began forming. This, in turn, suggests that future deep JWST observations may identify relatively bright galaxies to much earlier epochs than might have been anticipated.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ccafe9bae3acb9f187231c2d35cdfe405451e3bd

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Citations in the corpus

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): “In de ﬁ ance of expectations, several studies immediately reported the presence of bright ( m  27.5 ) galaxies at z > 10 from the CEERS and GLASS surveys ( e.g., Finkelstein et al. 2022b; Naidu et al. 2022b; Castellano et al. 2022; Donnan et al. 2023a ) .”
A Comprehensive Study of Galaxies at z ∼ 9–16 Found in the Early JWST Data: Ultraviolet Luminosity Functions and Cosmic Star Formation History at the Pre-reionization Epoch (2022, methodology): “Naidu et al. (2022b) Using the ERS CEERS and GLASS data sets, Naidu et al. (2022b) found two bright galaxy candidates at z∼ 10 and 12, GLASS-z10 and GLASS-z12, which correspond to GL-z9-1 and GL-z12-1 in our sample, respectively.”
The James Webb Space Telescope Mission (2023, background): “Early results from the CEERS data include the discovery of candidate galaxies at z> 8 (e.g., Finkelstein et al. 2022; Naidu et al. 2022; Topping et al. 2022; Ono et al. 2022) and studies of galaxies at 3< z< 7, including quiescent galaxies (Carnall et al. 2023), AGN host galaxies (Ding et al. 2022;…”
The evolution of the galaxy UV luminosity function at redshifts z ≃ 8 – 15 from deep JWST and ground-based near-infrared imaging (2022, background): “In addition to independently uncovering the 2 bright galaxies at redshifts 𝑧 ' 10.5 and 𝑧 ' 12.5 recently reported by Naidu et al. (2022a) and Castellano et al. (2022) from the GLASS NIRCam imaging, we here report the discovery of an additional 43 galaxies at 𝑧 > 8.5 from the combined…”
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).”
On the stunning abundance of super-early, luminous galaxies revealed by JWST (2022, background): “The model correctly predicts the abundance of super-early, bright JWST candidates both at z = 11.5 (Naidu et al. 2022) and 13.75 (Donnan et al. 2022), by assuming a negligible dust attenuation at those redshifts.”
CEERS Key Paper. I. An Early Look into the First 500 Myr of Galaxy Formation with JWST (2022, methodology): “…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., Donnan et al. 2023, hereafter D23;Finkelstein et al. 2022b;…”