UNCOVER: Illuminating the Early Universe-JWST/NIRSpec Confirmation of z > 12 Galaxies
Labbé, Ivo; van Dokkum, Pieter; Fujimoto, Seiji; Bezanson, Rachel; Price, Sedona H.; Brammer, Gabriel; Greene, Jenny E.; Marchesini, Danilo; Williams, Christina C.; Leja, Joel; Whitaker, Katherine E.; Goulding, Andy D.; Zitrin, Adi; Oesch, Pascal A.; Fudamoto, Y.; Atek, Hakim; Khullar, Gourav; Miller, Tim B.; Wang, Bingjie; Weaver, John R.; Kokorev, Vasily; Chemerynska, Iryna; Dayal, Pratika; Furtak, Lukas J.; Setton, David J.; Cutler, Sam E.; Pan, Richard
United States, Australia, Israel, France, Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands, Japan
Abstract
Observations of high-redshift galaxies provide a critical direct test to the theories of early galaxy formation, yet to date, only three have been spectroscopically confirmed at z > 12. Due to strong gravitational lensing over a wide area, the galaxy cluster field A2744 is ideal for searching for the earliest galaxies. Here we present JWST/NIRSpec observations of two galaxies: a robust detection at ${z}_{\mathrm{spec}}={12.393}_{-0.001}^{+0.004}$ , and a plausible candidate at ${z}_{\mathrm{spec}}={13.079}_{-0.001}^{+0.013}$ . The galaxies are discovered in JWST/NIRCam imaging and their distances are inferred with JWST/NIRSpec spectroscopy, all from the JWST Cycle 1 UNCOVER Treasury survey. Detailed stellar population modeling using JWST NIRCam and NIRSpec data corroborates the primeval characteristics of these galaxies: low mass (~108 M ⊙), young, rapidly assembling, metal-poor, and star-forming. Interestingly, both galaxies are spatially resolved, having lensing-corrected rest-UV effective radii on the order of 300-400 pc, which are notably larger than other spectroscopically confirmed systems at similar redshifts. The observed dynamic range of z ≳ 10 sizes spans over 1 order of magnitude, implying a significant scatter in the size-mass relation at early times. Deep into the epoch of reionization, these discoveries elucidate the emergence of the first galaxies.