Early Results from GLASS-JWST. XVII. Building the First Galaxies—Chapter 1. Star Formation Histories for 5 < z < 7 Galaxies

Creators: Dressler, Alan; Vulcani, Benedetta; Treu, Tommaso; Rieke, Marcia J.; Burns, Chris; Calabrò, Antonello; Bonchi, Andrea; Castellano, Marco; Fontana, Adriano; Leethochawalit, Nicha; Mason, Charlotte; Merlin, Emiliano; Morishita, Takahiro; Paris, Diego; Bradac, Marusa; Mercurio, Amata; Nanayakkara, Themiya; Poggianti, Bianca M.; Santini, Paola; Wang, Xin; Misselt, Karl; Stark, Daniel P.; Willmer, Christopher

Abstract

The JWST observations of high-redshift galaxies are used to measure their star formation histories—the buildup of stellar mass in the earliest galaxies. Here we use a novel analysis program, SEDz*, to compare near-IR spectral energy distributions for galaxies with redshifts 5 < z < 7 to combinations of stellar population templates evolved from z = 12. We exploit NIRCam imaging in seven wide bands covering 1–5 μm taken in the context of the GLASS-JWST-ERS program and use SEDz* to solve for well-constrained star formation histories for 24 exemplary galaxies. In this first look, we find a variety of histories, from long, continuous star formation over 5 < z < 12 to short but intense starbursts, sometimes repeating, and, most commonly, contiguous mass buildup lasting ∼0.5 Myr, possibly the seeds of today's typical M* galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2023. 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. Early Results from GLASS-JWST A.D. gratefully acknowledges the support of the NIRCam team for the opportunity to contribute to the NIRCam science program on the earliest galaxies. The DC2 "deep field" simulation was a Herculean task that provided the essential guidance for the program described here and the NIRCam GTO program to come. A.D. also thanks the GLASS team for allowing him in, to lift the curtain on the growth of the first galaxies—what the "HST & Beyond" Committee (Dressler et al. 1996) dared to dream. This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program JWST-ERS-1324. The JWST data used in this paper can be found on MAST at DOI: 10.17909/fqaq-p393. We acknowledge financial support from NASA through grant JWST-ERS-1324. D.S., K.M., M.R., and A.D. are supported by JWST/NIRCam contract to the University of Arizona NAS 5-02015. A.M. acknowledges financial support through grant PRIN-MIUR 2017WSCC32.

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