JWSTで原始の霧を晴らした「宇宙の灯台」が特定される(‘Cosmic lighthouses’ that cleared primordial fog identified with JWST)

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2024-02-28 ペンシルベニア州立大学(PennState)

NASAのジェームズ・ウェッブ宇宙望遠鏡のデータを使用し、科学者らは初期宇宙の最初の星光のスペクトルを取得しました。これにより、10億年未満の時点で誕生した低質量の新生銀河の詳細な画像が明らかになり、これらの小さな銀河が宇宙の起源において重要な役割を果たしたことが示唆されました。研究は、小さな銀河が宇宙の再イオン化に中心的な役割を果たしたことを明らかにし、初期の星形成や銀河進化についての洞察を提供しています。

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宇宙を再イオン化した光子の大部分は矮小銀河から飛来していた Most of the photons that reionized the Universe came from dwarf galaxies

Hakim Atek,Ivo Labbé,Lukas J. Furtak,Iryna Chemerynska,Seiji Fujimoto,David J. Setton,Tim B. Miller,Pascal Oesch,Rachel Bezanson,Sedona H. Price,Pratika Dayal,Adi Zitrin,Vasily Kokorev,John R. Weaver,Gabriel Brammer,Pieter van Dokkum,Christina C. Williams,Sam E. Cutler,Robert Feldmann,Yoshinobu Fudamoto,Jenny E. Greene,Joel Leja,Michael V. Maseda,Adam Muzzin,… Katherine E. Whitaker
Nature  Published:28 February 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07043-6

JWSTで原始の霧を晴らした「宇宙の灯台」が特定される(‘Cosmic lighthouses’ that cleared primordial fog identified with JWST)

Abstract

The identification of sources driving cosmic reionization, a major phase transition from neutral hydrogen to ionized plasma around 600–800 Myr after the Big Bang1,2,3, has been a matter of debate4. Some models suggest that high ionizing emissivity and escape fractions (fesc) from quasars support their role in driving cosmic reionization5,6. Others propose that the high fesc values from bright galaxies generate sufficient ionizing radiation to drive this process7. Finally, a few studies suggest that the number density of faint galaxies, when combined with a stellar-mass-dependent model of ionizing efficiency and fesc, can effectively dominate cosmic reionization8,9. However, so far, comprehensive spectroscopic studies of low-mass galaxies have not been done because of their extreme faintness. Here we report an analysis of eight ultra-faint galaxies (in a very small field) during the epoch of reionization with absolute magnitudes between MUV ≈ −17 mag and −15 mag (down to 0.005L (refs. 10,11)). We find that faint galaxies during the first thousand million years of the Universe produce ionizing photons with log[ξion (Hz erg−1)] = 25.80 ± 0.14, a factor of 4 higher than commonly assumed values12. If this field is representative of the large-scale distribution of faint galaxies, the rate of ionizing photons exceeds that needed for reionization, even for escape fractions of the order of 5%.

1701物理及び化学
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