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Related papers: Reionization after JWST: a photon budget crisis?

200 papers

The Epoch of Reionization marks the last major phase transition in the early Universe, during which the majority of neutral hydrogen once filling the intergalactic medium was ionized by the first galaxies. The James Webb Space Telescope is…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-07-01 Cody Carr , Renyue Cen , Sophia Flury , Sally Oey , Stephan McCandliss , Allison Strom

JWST is providing constraints on the history of reionization owing to its ability to detect faint galaxies at $z\gg6$. Modeling this history requires understanding both the ionizing photon production rate ($\xi_{\rm ion}$) and the fraction…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-01-22 Nicholas Choustikov , Richard Stiskalek , Aayush Saxena , Harley Katz , Julien Devriendt , Adrianne Slyz

Charting the Epoch of Reionization demands robust assessments of what drives the production of ionizing photons in high-redshift star-forming galaxies (SFGs), and requires better predictive capabilities from current observations. Using a…

In the last few years, prominent high-ionization nebular emission lines (i.e., OIII], CIII], CIV, HeII) have been observed in the deep UV spectra of z~5-7 galaxies, indicating that extreme radiation fields characterize reionization-era…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-06-12 Danielle A. Berg , John Chisholm , Dawn K. Erb , Richard Pogge , Alaina Henry , Grace M. Olivier

JWST has transformed our understanding of early galaxy formation, providing an unprecedented view of the first billion years of cosmic history. In this work, we build upon our previously developed semi-analytical framework that…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-01-12 Anirban Chakraborty , Tirthankar Roy Choudhury

Reionizing the Universe with galaxies appears to require significant star formation in low-mass halos at early times, while local dwarf galaxy counts tell us that star formation has been minimal in small halos around us today. Using simple…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2014-07-08 Michael Boylan-Kolchin , James S. Bullock , Shea Garrison-Kimmel

The identification of sources driving cosmic reionization, a major phase transition from neutral Hydrogen to ionized plasma around 600-800 Myr after the Big Bang (Dayal et al. 2018, Mason et al. 2019, Robertson et al. 2022), has been a…

Hydrogen in the Universe was (re)ionised between redshifts $z \approx 10$ and $z \approx 6$. The nature of the sources of the ionising radiation is hotly debated, with faint galaxies below current detection limits regarded as prime…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2016-02-17 Mahavir Sharma , Tom Theuns , Carlos S. Frenk , Richard G. Bower , Robert A. Crain , Matthieu Schaller , Joop Schaye

Compact, low-mass galaxies with strong nebular emission are considered promising candidates for efficient ionizing photon production and escape. We present a spatially resolved analysis of 189 galaxies at redshifts $z \sim 6.7-7.6$ in JADES…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-07-23 Cheqiu Lyu , Enci Wang , Junxian Wang , Cheng Jia , Jie Song , Yangyao Chen , Zeyu Chen , Haoran Yu , Chengyu Ma , Jinyang Wang , Yifan Wang , Xu Kong

The contribution of stars in galaxies to cosmic reionisation depends on the star formation history in the Universe, the abundance of galaxies during reionisation, the escape fraction of ionising photons and the clumping factor of the…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-12 Jan-Pieter Paardekooper , Sadegh Khochfar , Claudio Dalla Vecchia

The quest to discover the most distant galaxies has developed rapidly in the last decade. We are now exploring redshifts of 6 and beyond, when the Universe was less than a billion years old, an epoch when the previously-neutral…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2009-09-10 Andrew Bunker , Elizabeth Stanway , Richard Ellis , Mark Lacy , Richard McMahon , Laurence Eyles , Daniel Stark , Kuenley Chiu

During the epoch of reionisation the first galaxies were enshrouded in pristine neutral gas, with one of the brightest emission lines in star-forming galaxies, Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$), expected to remain undetected until the Universe…

Motivated by recent evidence that the epoch of reionization of hydrogen may have ended at a redshift as low as z~6 we consider the detectability of the sources responsible for this reionization. The main idea is that reionization places…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 M. Stiavelli , S. M. Fall , N. Panagia

We exploit James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NIRCam observations from the GLASS-JWST-Early Release Science program to investigate galaxy stellar masses at z>7. We first show that JWST observations reduce the uncertainties on the stellar…

There has been great progress in recent years in discovering star forming galaxies at high redshifts (z>5), close to the epoch of reionization of the intergalactic medium (IGM). The WFC3 and ACS cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope have…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-12 Andrew Bunker

We investigate the burstiness of star formation and the ionizing efficiency of a large sample of galaxies at $0.7 < z < 1.5$ using HST grism spectroscopy and deep ultraviolet (UV) imaging in the GOODS-N and GOODS-S fields. The star…

We study the ionising photon production efficiency at the end of the Epoch of Reionisation ($z \sim 5.4 - 6.6$) for a sample of 30 Lyman-$\alpha$ emitters. This is a crucial quantity to infer the ionising photon budget of the Universe.…

Next generation observatories will enable us to study the first billion years of our Universe in unprecedented detail. Foremost among these are 21-cm interferometry with the HERA and the SKA, and high-$z$ galaxy observations with the James…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-01-08 Jaehong Park , Nicolas Gillet , Andrei Mesinger , Bradley Greig

A significant excess of the stellar mass density at high redshift has been discovered from the early data release of James Webb Space Telescope ($\it{JWST}$), and it may require a high star formation efficiency. However, this will lead to…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2023-10-31 Hengjie Lin , Yan Gong , Bin Yue , Xuelei Chen