New insight on the nature of cosmic reionizers from the CEERS survey

S. Mascia, L. Pentericci, A. Calabrò, P. Santini, L. Napolitano, P. Arrabal Haro, M. Castellano, M. Dickinson, P. Ocvirk, J. S.W. Lewis, R. Amorín, M. Bagley, R. Bhatawdekar, N. J. Cleri, L. Costantin, A. Dekel, S. L. Finkelstein, A. Fontana, M. Giavalisco, N. A. GroginN. P. Hathi, M. Hirschmann, B. W. Holwerda, I. Jung, J. S. Kartaltepe, A. M. Koekemoer, R. A. Lucas, C. Papovich, P. G. Pérez-González, N. Pirzkal, J. R. Trump, S. M. Wilkins, L. Y.A. Yung

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Epoch of Reionization (EoR) began when galaxies grew in abundance and luminosity, so their escaping Lyman continuum (LyC) radiation started ionizing the surrounding neutral intergalactic medium (IGM). Despite significant recent progress, the nature and role of cosmic reionizers are still unclear: in order to define them, it would be necessary to directly measure their LyC escape fraction (fesc). However, this is impossible during the EoR due to the opacity of the IGM. Consequently, many efforts at low and intermediate redshift have been made to determine measurable indirect indicators in high-redshift galaxies so that their fesc can be predicted. This work presents the analysis of the indirect indicators of 62 spectroscopically confirmed star-forming galaxies at 6 ≤ z ≤ 9 from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey, combined with 12 sources with public data from other JWST-ERS campaigns. From the NIRCam and NIRSpec observations, we measured their physical and spectroscopic properties. We discovered that on average 6 < z < 9 star-forming galaxies are compact in the rest-frame UV (re ∼ 0.4 kpc), are blue sources (UV-β slope ∼−2.17), and have a predicted fesc of about 0.13. A comparison of our results to models and predictions as well as an estimation of the ionizing budget suggests that low-mass galaxies with UV magnitudes fainter than M1500 = −18 that we currently do not characterize with JWST observations probably played a key role in the process of reionization.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberA3
JournalAstronomy and Astrophysics
Volume685
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 May 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Authors 2024.

Keywords

  • galaxies: evolution
  • galaxies: formation
  • galaxies: high-redshift
  • intergalactic medium

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