English

COSMOS-Web: The emergence of the Hubble Sequence

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-01-14 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

Leveraging the wide area coverage of the COSMOS-Web survey, we quantify the abundance of different morphological types from z7z\sim 7 with unprecedented statistics and establish robust constraints on the epoch of emergence of the Hubble sequence. We measure the global (spheroids, disk-dominated, bulge-dominated, peculiar) and resolved (stellar bars) morphologies for about 400,000 galaxies down to F150W=27 using deep learning, representing a two-orders-of-magnitude increase over previous studies. We then provide reference Stellar Mass Functions (SMFs) of different morphologies between z0.2z\sim 0.2 and z7z\sim 7 and best-fit parameters to inform models of galaxy formation. All catalogs and data are made publicly available. (a)At redshift z > 4.5, the massive galaxy population (logM/M>10\log M_*/M_\odot>10) is dominated by disturbed morphologies (~70%) -- even in the optical rest frame -- and very compact objects (~30%) with effective radii smaller than ~500pc. This confirms that a significant fraction of the star formation at cosmic dawn occurs in very dense regions, although the stellar mass for these systems could be overestimated.(b)Galaxies with Hubble-type morphologies -- including bulge and disk-dominated galaxies -- arose rapidly around z4z\sim 4 and dominate the morphological diversity of massive galaxies as early as z3z\sim 3. (c)Using stellar bars as a proxy, we speculate that stellar disks in massive galaxies might have been common (>50%) among the star-forming population since cosmic noon (z2z\sim2-2.5) and formed as early as z7z\sim 7 (d)Massive quenched galaxies are predominantly bulge-dominated from z~4 onward, suggesting that morphological transformations briefly precede or are simultaneous to quenching mechanisms at the high-mass end. (e) Low-mass (logM/M<10\log M_*/M_\odot<10) quenched galaxies are typically disk-dominated, pointing to different quenching routes in the two ends of the stellar mass spectrum from cosmic dawn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.03532,
  title  = {COSMOS-Web: The emergence of the Hubble Sequence},
  author = {M. Huertas-Company and M. Shuntov and Y. Dong and M. Walmsley and O. Ilbert and H. J. McCracken and H. B. Akins and N. Allen and C. M. Casey and L. Costantin and E. Daddi and A. Dekel and M. Franco and I. L. Garland and T. Géron and G. Gozaliasl and M. Hirschmann and J. S. Kartaltepe and A. M. Koekemoer and C. Lintott and D. Liu and R. Lucas and K. Masters and F. Pacucci and L. Paquereau and P. G. P'erez-Gonz'alez and J. D. Rhodes and B. E. Robertson and B. Simmons and R. Smethurst and S. Toft and L. Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.03532},
  year   = {2026}
}

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