JWST and ALMA Discern the Assembly of Structural and Obscured Components in a High-redshift Starburst Galaxy

Abstract

We present observations and analysis of the starburst PACS-819 at z = 1.45 (M * = 1010.7 M ⊙), using high-resolution (0.″1; 0.8 kpc) Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and multiwavelength JWST images from the COSMOS-Web program. Dissimilar to Hubble Space Telescope (HST) ACS images in the rest-frame UV, the redder NIRCam and MIRI images reveal a smooth central mass concentration and spiral-like features, atypical for such an intense starburst. Through dynamical modeling of the CO (J = 5–4) emission with ALMA, PACS-819 is rotation dominated and thus consistent with having a disk-like nature. However, kinematic anomalies in CO and asymmetric features in the bluer JWST bands (e.g., F150W) support a more disturbed nature likely due to interactions. The JWST imaging further enables us to map the distribution of stellar mass and dust attenuation, thus clarifying the relationships between different structural components not discernible in the previous HST images. The CO (J = 5–4) and far-infrared dust continuum emission are cospatial with a heavily obscured starbursting core (<1 kpc) that is partially surrounded by much less obscured star-forming structures including a prominent arc, possibly a tidally distorted dwarf galaxy, and a massive clump (detected in CO), likely a recently accreted low-mass satellite. With spatially resolved maps, we find a high molecular gas fraction in the central area reaching ∼3 (M gas/M *) and short depletion times (M gas/SFR ∼ 120 Myr, where SFR is star formation rate) across the entire system. These observations provide insights into the complex nature of starbursts in the distant Universe and underscore the wealth of complementary information from high-resolution observations with both ALMA and JWST.

A Strongly Lensed Dusty Starburst of an Intrinsic Disk Morphology at a Photometric Redshift of z ph > 7

“…The advent of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is bringing the study of high-z DSFGs to a new level. In merely over a year, the synergy of JWST and ALMA has brought us a lot of details on the connection between dust-obscured and unobscured ("exposed") stellar populations in DSFGs (e.g., Chen et al 2022;Cheng et al 2022Cheng et al , 2023Álvarez-Márquez et al 2023;Barger & Cowie 2023;Boogaard et al 2024;Fujimoto et al 2023;Hashimoto et al 2023;Huang et al 2023;Kamieneski et al 2023;Liu et al 2024;Rujopakarn et al 2023;Tadaki et al 2023;Yoon et al 2023;Killi et al 2024;Sun et al 2024), including a subset among the so-called "HST-dark" galaxies that are faint or even invisible at λ  1.6 μm (e.g., Kokorev et al 2023;Smail et al 2023;Zavala et al 2023).…”