Journal article

Dark-ages reionization and galaxy-formation simulation - VI. The origins and fate of the highest known redshift galaxy

SJ Mutch, C Liu, GB Poole, PM Geil, AR Duffy, M Trenti, PA Oesch, GD Illingworth, A Mesinger, JSB Wyithe

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | OXFORD UNIV PRESS | Published : 2016

Abstract

Using Hubble data, including new grism spectra, Oesch et al. recently identified GN-z11, an MUV = -21.1 galaxy at z = 11.1 (just 400 Myr after the big bang). With an estimated stellar mass of ~109 M⊙, this galaxy is surprisingly bright and massive, raising questions as to how such an extreme object could form so early in the Universe. Using MERAXES, a semi-analytic galaxy-formation model developed as part of the Dark-ages Reionization And Galaxy-formation Observables from Numerical Simulations (DRAGONS) programme, we investigate the potential formation mechanisms and eventual fate of GN-z11. The volume of our simulation is comparable to that of the discovery observations and possesses two an..

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Grants

Awarded by National Aeronautics and Space Administration


Funding Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI), grant ref. UOM0005, on its Peak Computing Facility hosted at the University of Melbourne, an initiative of the Victorian Government, Australia. Part of this work was performed on the gSTAR national facility at Swinburne University of Technology. gSTAR is funded by Swinburne and the Australian Governments Education Investment Fund. AM acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 638809 AIDA). PO and GDI acknowledge the support of NASA grant HST-GO-1387 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 526555. The DRAGONS research programme is funded by the Australian Research Council through the ARC Laureate Fellowship FL110100072 awarded to JSBW.