We report the discovery of 15 exceptionally luminous 10 ≲ z ≲ 14 candidate galaxies discovered in the first 0.28 deg2 of JWST/NIRCam imaging from the COSMOS-Web survey. These sources span rest-frame UV magnitudes of −20.5 > MUV > −22, and thus constitute the most intrinsically luminous z ≳ 10 candidates identified by JWST to date. Selected via NIRCam imaging, deep ground-based observations corroborate their detection and help significantly constrain their photometric redshifts. We analyze their spectral energy distributions using multiple open-source codes and evaluate the probability of low-redshift solutions; we conclude that 12/15 (80%) are likely genuine z ≳ 10 sources and 3/15 (20%) likely low-redshift contaminants. Three of our z ∼ 12 candidates push the limits of early stellar mass assembly: they have estimated stellar masses ∼ 5 × 109M⊙, implying an effective stellar baryon fraction of ε⋆ ∼ 0.2−0.5, where ε⋆ ≡ M⋆/(fbMhalo). The assembly of such stellar reservoirs is made possible due to rapid, burst-driven star formation on timescales < 100 Myr where the star formation rate may far outpace the growth of the underlying dark matter halos. This is supported by the similar volume densities inferred for M⋆ ∼ 1010M⊙ galaxies relative to M⋆ ∼ 109M⊙—both about 10−6 Mpc−3—implying they live in halos of comparable mass. At such high redshifts, the duty cycle for starbursts would be of order unity, which could cause the observed change in the shape of the UV luminosity function from a double power law to a Schechter function at z ≈ 8. Spectroscopic redshift confirmation and ensuing constraints of their masses will be critical to understand how, and if, such early massive galaxies push the limits of galaxy formation in the Lambda cold dark matter paradigm.
COSMOS-Web: Intrinsically Luminous z ≳ 10 Galaxy Candidates Test Early Stellar Mass Assembly
- Creators
- Casey, Caitlin M.
- Akins, Hollis B.
- Shuntov, Marko
- Ilbert, Olivier
- Paquereau, Louise
- Franco, Maximilien
- Hayward, Christopher C.
- Finkelstein, Steven L.
- Boylan-Kolchin, Michael
- Robertson, Brant E.
- Allen, Natalie
- Brinch, Malte
- Cooper, Olivia R.
- Ding, Xuheng
- Drakos, Nicole E.
- Faisst, Andreas L.
- Fujimoto, Seiji
- Gillman, Steven
- Harish, Santosh
- Hirschmann, Michaela
- Jin, Shuowen
- Kartaltepe, Jeyhan S.
- Koekemoer, Anton M.
- Kokorev, Vasily
- Liu, Daizhong
- Long, Arianna S.
- Magdis, Georgios
- Maraston, Claudia
- Martin, Crystal L.
- McCracken, Henry Joy
- McKinney, Jed
- Mobasher, Bahram
- Rhodes, Jason
- Rich, R. Michael
- Sanders, David B.
- Silverman, John D.
- Toft, Sune
- Vijayan, Aswin P.
- Weaver, John R.
- Wilkins, Stephen M.
- Yang, Lilan
- Zavala, Jorge A.
Abstract
Copyright and License
© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for constructive feedback during the refereeing process. Support for this work was provided by NASA through grant JWST-GO-01727 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. C.M.C., H.A., M.F., J.M., A.S.L., and O.R.C. acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation through grants AST-2307006, AST-2009577, and the UT Austin College of Natural Sciences for support. C.M.C. also acknowledges support from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement from a 2019 Cottrell Scholar Award sponsored by IF/THEN, an initiative of the Lyda Hill Philanthropies.
The Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN) is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) under grant No. 140. This work was made possible thanks to the CANDIDE cluster at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, which was funded through grants from the PNCG, CNES, DIM-ACAV, and the Cosmic Dawn Center; CANDIDE is maintained by S. Rouberol. The French contingent of the COSMOS team is partly supported by the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES). O.I. acknowledges the funding of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche for the project iMAGE (grant ANR-22-CE31-0007). M.B.K. acknowledges support from NSF CAREER award AST-1752913, NSF grants AST-1910346 and AST-2108962, NASA grant 80NSSC22K0827, and HST-AR-15809, HST-GO-15658, HST-GO-15901, HST-GO-15902, HST-AR-16159, HST-GO-16226, HST-GO-16686, HST-AR-17028, and HST-AR-17043 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. S.G. acknowledges financial support from the Villum Young Investigator grants 37440 and 13160.
Data Availability
Based in part on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory under ESO programmes 179.A-2005 and 198.A-2003 and on data obtained from the ESO Science Archive Facility with doi:10.18727/archive/52, and on data products produced by CALET and the Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit on behalf of the UltraVISTA consortium. Some of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The specific observations analyzed can be accessed via doi:10.17909/ahg3-e826.
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 1538-4357
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- JWST-GO-01727
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NAS5-26555
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2307006
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2009577
- The University of Texas at Austin
- Research Corporation for Science Advancement
- 2019 Cottrell Scholar
- Lyda Hill Philanthropies
- Danish National Research Foundation
- 140
- Centre National d'Études Spatiales
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche
- ANR-22-CE31-0007
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1752913
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1910346
- National Science Foundation
- AST-2108962
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC22K0827
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-AR-15809
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-GO-15658
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-GO-15901
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-GO-15902
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-AR-16159
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-GO-16226
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-GO-16686
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-AR-17028
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- HST-AR-17043
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NAS5-26555
- Villum Fonden
- 37440
- Villum Fonden
- 13160
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)