Journal
NATURE ASTRONOMY
Volume 1, Issue 5, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-017-0091
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program [ASTRO14F-0007]
- W.M. Keck Foundation
- NASA [NAS5-26555, NNX08AD79G]
- NASA through a grant from the STScI [HST-G0-13459]
- NASA from STScI [HST-AR-13235, HST-GO-13177, HST-GO-10200, HST-GO-10863, HST-GO-11099]
- NASA through a Spitzer award
- NASA [103019, NNX08AD79G] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Within one billion years of the Big Bang, intergalactic hydrogen was ionized by sources emitting ultraviolet and higher energy photons. This was the final phenomenon to globally affect all the baryons (visible matter) in the Universe. It is referred to as cosmic reionization and is an integral component of cosmology. It is broadly expected that intrinsically faint galaxies were the primary ionizing sources due to their abundance in this epoch(1,2).However, at the highest redshifts (z > 7.5; lookback time 13.1 Gyr), all galaxies with spectroscopic confirmations to date are intrinsically bright and, therefore, not necessarily representative of the general population(3). Here, we report the unequivocal spectroscopic detection of a low luminosity galaxy at z > 7.5. We detected the Lyman-a emission line at similar to 10,504 angstrom in two separate observations with MOSFIRE4 on the Keck I Telescope and independently with the Hubble Space Telescope's slitless grism spectrograph, implying a source redshift of z = 7.640 +/- 0.001. The galaxy is gravitationally magnified by the massive galaxy cluster MACS J1423.8+2404 (z = 0.545), with an estimated intrinsic luminosity of MAB = -19.6 +/- 0.2 mag and a stellar mass of M-star =3.0(-0.8)(+1.5)X 10(8) solar masses. Both are an order of magnitude lower than the four other Lyman-alpha emitters currently known at z > 7.5, making it probably the most distant representative source of reionization found to date.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available