CaltechAUTHORS
Published December 1, 2022 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: A Candidate z ∼ 12 Galaxy in Early JWST CEERS Imaging

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon The University of Texas at Austin
  • 2. ROR icon NOIRLab
  • 3. ROR icon Space Telescope Science Institute
  • 4. ROR icon Rochester Institute of Technology
  • 5. ROR icon Texas A&M University
  • 6. Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, CNES, LAM Marseille, France
  • 7. ROR icon Colby College
  • 8. ROR icon Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
  • 9. ROR icon University of La Laguna
  • 10. ROR icon University of Paris
  • 11. ROR icon University of Toronto
  • 12. NSF Graduate Fellow
  • 13. ROR icon Centro de Astrobiología
  • 14. ROR icon University of Cambridge
  • 15. ROR icon University of Sussex
  • 16. ROR icon University of Malta
  • 17. NSF Graduate Fellow.
  • 18. Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, 162 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
  • 19. Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
  • 20. ROR icon Astronomical Observatory of Rome
  • 21. ROR icon University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • 22. ROR icon Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova
  • 23. ROR icon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
  • 24. ROR icon University of Kansas
  • 25. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 26. ROR icon University of Connecticut
  • 27. ROR icon University of Groningen
  • 28. ROR icon Netherlands Institute for Space Research
  • 29. ROR icon University of Nottingham
  • 30. ROR icon University of La Serena
  • 31. ROR icon University of the Pacific
  • 32. ROR icon University of Arizona
  • 33. ROR icon National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
  • 34. ROR icon University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
  • 35. ROR icon European Space Research and Technology Centre
  • 36. ROR icon University of Padua
  • 37. ROR icon University of Valladolid
  • 38. ROR icon University of Lisbon
  • 39. ROR icon Arizona State University
  • 40. ROR icon American Association For The Advancement of Science
  • 41. ROR icon University of California, Irvine
  • 42. ROR icon Swinburne University of Technology
  • 43. ROR icon Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics
  • 44. ROR icon University of Edinburgh
  • 45. ROR icon University of the Western Cape
  • 46. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University
  • 47. ROR icon Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • 48. ROR icon Saint Mary's University
  • 49. ROR icon University of California, Santa Cruz
  • 50. ROR icon Observatory of Strasbourg
  • 51. ROR icon University of Copenhagen
  • 52. ROR icon Complutense University of Madrid
  • 53. ROR icon Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
  • 54. ROR icon Shawnee State University
  • 55. ROR icon University of Louisville
  • 56. ROR icon École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
  • 57. ROR icon Williams College
  • 58. ROR icon Catholic University of America
  • 59. ROR icon University of Minnesota
  • 60. ROR icon University of Missouri–Kansas City
  • 61. ROR icon University of California, Riverside
  • 62. ROR icon University of Pittsburgh
  • 63. ROR icon Australian National University
  • 64. ROR icon Columbia University
  • 65. Hubble Fellow.
  • 66. ROR icon University of California, Davis
  • 67. ROR icon University of Science and Technology of China
  • 68. ROR icon University of Warwick
  • 69. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 70. ROR icon University of Bath

Abstract

We report the discovery of a candidate galaxy with a photo-z of z ∼ 12 in the first epoch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey. Following conservative selection criteria, we identify a source with a robust zphot = 11.8−0.2+0.3 (1σ uncertainty) with mF200W = 27.3 and ≳7σ detections in five filters. The source is not detected at λ < 1.4 μm in deep imaging from both Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and JWST and has faint ∼3σ detections in JWST F150W and HST F160W, which signal a Lyα break near the red edge of both filters, implying z ∼ 12. This object (Maisie's Galaxy) exhibits F115W − F200W > 1.9 mag (2σ lower limit) with a blue continuum slope, resulting in 99.6% of the photo-z probability distribution function favoring z > 11. All data-quality images show no artifacts at the candidate's position, and independent analyses consistently find a strong preference for z > 11. Its colors are inconsistent with Galactic stars, and it is resolved (rh = 340 ± 14 pc). Maisie's Galaxy has log M*/M⊙ ∼ 8.5 and is highly star-forming (log sSFR ∼ −8.2 yr−1), with a blue rest-UV color (β ∼ −2.5) indicating little dust, though not extremely low metallicity. While the presence of this source is in tension with most predictions, it agrees with empirical extrapolations assuming UV luminosity functions that smoothly decline with increasing redshift. Should follow-up spectroscopy validate this redshift, our universe was already aglow with galaxies less than 400 Myr after the Big Bang.

Copyright and License

© 2022. 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.

Funding

We acknowledge support from NASA through STScI ERS award JWST-ERS-1345. D.B. and M.H.-C. thank the Programme National de Cosmologie et Galaxies and CNES for their support. R.A. acknowledges support from Fondecyt Regular 1202007.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge that the location where this work took place, the University of Texas at Austin, sits on indigenous land. The Tonkawa lived in central Texas, and the Comanche and Apache moved through this area. We pay our respects to all of the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas on this piece of Turtle Island.

We thank the entire JWST team, including the engineers, for making possible this wonderful overperforming telescope, the commissioning team for obtaining these early data, and the pipeline teams for their work over the years building and supporting the pipeline. The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin for providing HPC and visualization resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. We thank Brendan Bowler, Caroline Morley, Jim Dunlop, and Mike Boylan-Kolchin for helpful conversations and the anonymous referee for constructive comments.

Software References

Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013), Bagpipes (Carnall et al. 2018), Cigale (Burgarella et al. 2005; Noll et al. 2009; Boquien et al. 2019), Dense Basis (Iyer & Gawiser 2017; Iyer et al. 2019), Drizzle (Fruchter & Hook 2002), eazy (Brammer et al. 2008), GalfitM (Peng et al. 2010; Häußler et al. 2013), Photutils (Bradley et al. 2020), Prospector (Johnson et al. 2021), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020), SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996), Statmorph (Rodriguez-Gomez et al. 2019), STScI JWST Calibration Pipeline (jwst-pipeline.readthedocs.io).

Files

Finkelstein_2022_ApJL_940_L55.pdf

Files (1.9 MB)

Name Size Download all
md5:5c60757e30fdfe3a5fba068a6b1fb9f2
1.9 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Funding

Space Telescope Science Institute
JWST-ERS-1345
Centre National d'Études Spatiales

Dates

Accepted
2022-09-02
Accepted
Available
2022-12-01
Published online

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)
Publication Status
Published