1. The eventful life of a luminous galaxy at z = 14: metal enrichment, feedback, and low gas fraction?
- Author
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Carniani, Stefano, D'Eugenio, Francesco, Ji, Xihan, Parlanti, Eleonora, Scholtz, Jan, Sun, Fengwu, Venturi, Giacomo, Bakx, Tom J. L. C., Curti, Mirko, Maiolino, Roberto, Tacchella, Sandro, Zavala, Jorge A., Hainline, Kevin, Witstok, Joris, Johnson, Benjamin D., Alberts, Stacey, Bunker, Andrew J., Charlot, Stéphane, Eisenstein, Daniel J., Helton, Jakob M., Jakobsen, Peter, Kumari, Nimisha, Robertson, Brant, Saxena, Aayush, Übler, Hannah, Williams, Christina C., Willmer, Christopher N. A., and Willott, Chris
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies ,Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics - Abstract
JADES-GS-z14-0 is the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy so far, at $z>14$. With a UV magnitude of -20.81, it is one of the most luminous galaxies at cosmic dawn and its half-light radius of 260 pc means that stars dominate the observed UV emission. We report the ALMA detection of [OIII]88$\mu$m line emission with a significance of 6.67$\sigma$ and at a frequency of 223.524 GHz, corresponding to a redshift of $14.1796\pm0.0007$, which is consistent with the candidate CIII] line detected in the NIRSpec spectrum. At this spectroscopic redshift, the Lyman break identified with NIRSpec requires a damped Lyman-$\alpha$ absorber with a column density of $\log(N_{\rm HI}/\mathrm{cm}^{-2})=22.23$. The total [OIII]88$\mu$m luminosity (log($(L_{\rm [OIII]}/L_\odot) = 8.3\pm0.1$) is fully consistent with the local $L_{\rm [OIII]}-SFR$ relation. Based on the ${L_{\rm [OIII]}/SFR}$, we infer a gas-phase metallicity $>0.1~{\rm Z_{\rm \odot}}$, which is somewhat unexpected given the weakness of the UV emission lines. Using prospector SED modeling and combining the ALMA data with JWST observations, we find $Z=0.17~{Z_{\rm \odot}}$ and an escape fraction of ionizing photons of 20%, which is necessary to explain the UV spectrum. We measure an [O III]5007\r{A}/[O III]88$\mu$m line flux ratio between 1 and 10, resulting in an upper limit to the electron density of roughly 300 cm$^{-3}$, which is lower than those measured in other high-$z$ luminous galaxies. The [OIII]88$\mu$m emission line is spectrally resolved, with a FWHM of 100 km/s, resulting in a dynamical mass of $\log$(M$_{\rm dyn}/M_\odot$) = 9.0$\pm0.2$. This value is comparable to the stellar mass derived from the SED fitting, which implies a very low gas fraction. Past radiation-driven outflows may have cleared the galaxy from the gas, reducing the gas fraction and thus increasing the escape fraction of ionizing photons., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure
- Published
- 2024