JWST Reveals a Population of Ultrared, Flattened Galaxies at 2 ≲ z ≲ 6 Previously Missed by HST

Nelson, Erica J.; Suess, Katherine A.; Bezanson, Rachel; Price, Sedona H.; Dokkum, Pieter van; Leja, Joel; Whitaker, Bingjie Wang Katherine E.; Labbé, Ivo; Barrufet, L.; Brammer, Gabriel; Eisenstein, Daniel J.; Heintz, K. E.; Johnson, Benjamin D.; Mathews, Elijah; Miller, Tim B.; Oesch, Pascal; Sandles, Lester; Setton, David J.; Speagle, Joshua S.; Tacchella, Sandro; Tadaki, Ken-ichi

doi:10.3847/2041-8213/acc1e1

Cited by 44 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 101 publications

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“…However, the first JWST observations challenged this picture. Ferreira et al (2023), Jacobs et al (2023), Nelson et al (2023), andRobertson et al (2023) all found a higher fraction of high-redshift disks and a lower fraction of peculiar galaxies than expected. The initial results, although based on small data sets, suggested either that mergers are less frequent than we thought or that high-redshift disks tend to survive mergers and retain their disk morphology.…”

Section: The Role Of Mergers In Early Galaxy Assemblymentioning

confidence: 58%

“…At high redshift, fine structural details are often difficult to recover and in general are ambiguous, hence these questions capture the overall appearance of the source. Our sample is the biggest visually classified sample observed with JWST yet, ∼20 times larger than what is reported in previous JWST morphology results (Ferreira et al 2023;Jacobs et al 2023;Nelson et al 2023). A brief description of each possible resulting class is given below: 1.…”

Section: Visual Classificationmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…While earlier HST-based studies found that the dominating majority of galaxies at z > 2 are peculiar, recent JWST-based studies find a high number of regular disk galaxies at high redshift (e.g., Ferreira et al 2023;Jacobs et al 2023;Nelson et al 2023;Robertson et al 2023), consistent with an even earlier emergence of the Hubble Sequence. The nature of this evolution and its implications, however, are still unknown.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

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The JWST Hubble Sequence: The Rest-frame Optical Evolution of Galaxy Structure at 1.5 < z < 6.5

Ferreira,

Conselice,

Sazonova

et al. 2023

ApJ

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We present results on the morphological and structural evolution of a total of 3956 galaxies observed with JWST at 1.5 < z < 6.5 in the JWST CEERS observations that overlap with the CANDELS EGS field. This is the biggest visually classified sample observed with JWST yet, ∼20 times larger than previous studies, and allows us to examine in detail how galaxy structure has changed over this critical epoch. All sources were classified by six individual classifiers using a simple classification scheme aimed at producing disk/spheroid/peculiar classifications, whereby we determine how the relative number of these morphologies has evolved since the Universe’s first billion years. Additionally, we explore structural and quantitative morphology measurements using Morfometryka, and show that galaxies with M * > 109 M ⊙ at z > 3 are not dominated by irregular and peculiar structures, either visually or quantitatively, as previously thought. We find a strong dominance of morphologically selected disk galaxies up to z = 6 in this mass range. We also find that the stellar mass and star formation rate densities are dominated by disk galaxies up to z ∼ 6, demonstrating that most stars in the Universe were likely formed in a disk galaxy. We compare our results to theory to show that the fraction of types we find is predicted by cosmological simulations, and that the Hubble Sequence was already in place as early as one billion years after the Big Bang. Additionally, we make our visual classifications public for the community.

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Section: The Role Of Mergers In Early Galaxy Assemblymentioning

confidence: 58%

Section: Visual Classificationmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

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The JWST Hubble Sequence: The Rest-frame Optical Evolution of Galaxy Structure at 1.5 < z < 6.5

Ferreira,

Conselice,

Sazonova

et al. 2023

ApJ

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“…The first JWST images revealed a diversity of morphological and structural properties of high-z galaxies (e.g., Ferreira et al 2022;Jacobs et al 2023;Suess et al 2022;Robertson et al 2023b;Kartaltepe et al 2023;Nelson et al 2023), including compact and clumpy structures (e.g., Tacchella et al 2023;Chen et al 2023). GN-z11 is not an exception and the images are morphologically complex because of the haze to the northeast.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

JADES Imaging of GN-z11: Revealing the Morphology and Environment of a Luminous Galaxy 430 Myr after the Big Bang

Tacchella

Eisenstein

Hainline

et al. 2023

ApJ

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We present JWST NIRCam nine-band near-infrared imaging of the luminous z = 10.6 galaxy GN-z11 from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey of the GOODS-N field. We find a spectral energy distribution (SED) entirely consistent with the expected form of a high-redshift galaxy: a clear blue continuum from 1.5 to 4 μm with a complete dropout in F115W. The core of GN-z11 is extremely compact in JWST imaging. We analyze the image with a two-component model, using a point source and a Sérsic profile that fits to a half-light radius of 200 pc and an index n = 0.9. We find a low-surface-brightness haze about 0.″4 to the northeast of the galaxy, which is most likely a foreground object but might be a more extended component of GN-z11. At a spectroscopic redshift of 10.60 (Bunker et al. 2023), the comparison of the NIRCam F410M and F444W images spans the Balmer jump. From population-synthesis modeling, here assuming no light from an active galactic nucleus, we reproduce the SED of GN-z11, finding a stellar mass of ∼109 M ⊙, a star formation rate of ∼20 M ⊙ yr−1, and a young stellar age of ∼20 Myr. Since massive galaxies at high redshift are likely to be highly clustered, we search for faint neighbors of GN-z11, finding nine galaxies out to ∼5 comoving Mpc transverse with photometric redshifts consistent with z = 10.6, and a tenth more tentative dropout only 3″ away. This is consistent with GN-z11 being hosted by a massive dark-matter halo (≈8 × 1010 M ⊙), though lower halo masses cannot be ruled out.

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“…Another, perhaps more speculative, explanation for this widespread (and relatively uniform) dust reddening in this (modestly inclined, in contrast to Nelson et al 2023; see also Kokorev et al 2023) galaxy is a dusty wind, as is seen on similar scales in M 82 (e.g., Yamagishi et al 2012;Beirão et al 2015), Mg II absorbers at higher redshifts (Ménard & Fukugita 2012), and also as theoretically expected (e.g., Krumholz & Thompson 2013). To illustrate the plausibility of this explanation, we assume a Milky Way gas-to-dust ratio, for which an A V ∼ 3 corresponds to a hydrogen column density of ∼10 22 cm −2 (Bouchet et al 1985).…”

Section: Morphologies and Structuresmentioning

confidence: 76%

Hidden Giants in JWST's PEARLS: An Ultramassive z = 4.26 Submillimeter Galaxy that Is Invisible to HST

Smail,

Dudzevičiūtė,

Gurwell

et al. 2023

ApJ

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We present a multiwavelength analysis using the Submillimeter Array (SMA), James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, NOEMA, JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the Spitzer Space Telescope of two dusty strongly star-forming galaxies, 850.1 and 850.2, seen through the massive cluster lens A 1489. These SMA-located sources both lie at z = 4.26 and have bright dust continuum emission, but 850.2 is a UV-detected Lyman-break galaxy, while 850.1 is undetected at ≲ 2 μm, even with deep JWST/NIRCam observations. We investigate their stellar, interstellar medium, and dynamical properties, including a pixel-level spectral energy distribution analysis to derive subkiloparsec-resolution stellar-mass and A V maps. We find that 850.1 is one of the most massive and highly obscured, A V ∼ 5, galaxies known at z > 4 with M * ∼1011.8 M ⊙ (likely forming at z > 6), and 850.2 is one of the least massive and least obscured, A V ∼ 1, members of the z > 4 dusty star-forming population. The diversity of these two dust-mass-selected galaxies illustrates the incompleteness of galaxy surveys at z ≳ 3–4 based on imaging at ≲ 2 μm, the longest wavelengths feasible from HST or the ground. The resolved mass map of 850.1 shows a compact stellar-mass distribution, R e mass ∼1 kpc, but its expected evolution means that it matches both the properties of massive, quiescent galaxies at z ∼ 1.5 and ultramassive early-type galaxies at z ∼ 0. We suggest that 850.1 is the central galaxy of a group in which 850.2 is a satellite that will likely merge in the near future. The stellar morphology of 850.1 shows arms and a linear bar feature that we link to the active dynamical environment it resides within.

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JWST Reveals a Population of Ultrared, Flattened Galaxies at 2 ≲ z ≲ 6 Previously Missed by HST

Cited by 44 publications

References 101 publications

The JWST Hubble Sequence: The Rest-frame Optical Evolution of Galaxy Structure at 1.5 < z < 6.5

The JWST Hubble Sequence: The Rest-frame Optical Evolution of Galaxy Structure at 1.5 < z < 6.5

JADES Imaging of GN-z11: Revealing the Morphology and Environment of a Luminous Galaxy 430 Myr after the Big Bang

Hidden Giants in JWST's PEARLS: An Ultramassive z = 4.26 Submillimeter Galaxy that Is Invisible to HST

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