JADES Imaging of GN-z11: Revealing the Morphology and Environment of a Luminous Galaxy 430 Myr After the Big Bang

Abstract

We present JWST NIRCam 9-band near-infrared imaging of the luminous $z=10.6$ galaxy GN-z11 from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) of the GOODS-N field. We find a spectral energy distribution (SED) entirely consistent with the expected form of a high-redshift galaxy: a clear blue continuum from 1.5 to 4 microns with a complete dropout in F115W. The core of GN-z11 is extremely compact in JWST imaging. We analyze the image with a two-component model, using a point source and a Sérsic profile that fits to a half-light radius of 200 pc and an index $n=0.9$. We find a low-surface brightness haze about $0.4^{\prime \prime }$ to the northeast of the galaxy, which is most likely a foreground object but might be a more extended component of GN-z11. At a spectroscopic redshift of 10.60 (Bunker et al. 2023), the comparison of the NIRCam F410M and F444W images spans the Balmer jump. From population synthesis modeling, here assuming no light from an active galactic nucleus, we reproduce the SED of GN-z11, finding a stellar mass of $\sim$$10^9{M}_{\odot }$, a star-formation rate of $\sim$$20M_{\odot }{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$ and a young stellar age of $\sim$$20\mathrm{Myr}$. As massive galaxies at high redshift are likely to be highly clustered, we search for faint neighbors of GN-z11, finding 9 galaxies out to $\sim$5 comoving Mpc transverse with photometric redshifts consistent with $z=10.6$, and a 10${}^{\mathrm{th}}$ more tentative dropout only $3^{\prime \prime }$ away. This is consistent with GN-z11 being hosted by a massive dark-matter halo ($\approx 8\times 10^{10}{M}_{\odot }$), though lower halo masses cannot be ruled out.

18 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

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