The eventful life of a luminous galaxy at z = 14: metal enrichment, feedback, and low gas fraction?

Abstract

JADES-GS-z14-0 is the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy yet, at $z>14$. With a UV magnitude of -20.81, it is one of the most luminous galaxies at cosmic dawn and its half-light radius of 260 pc means that stars dominate the observed UV emission. We report ALMA detection of [OIII]88$\mu$m line emission with a significance of 6.67$\sigma$ and at a frequency of 223.524~GHz, corresponding to a redshift of $14.1796\pm 0.0007$, which is consistent with the candidate CIII] line detected in the NIRSpec spectrum. At this spectroscopic redshift, the Lyman-$\alpha$ break identified with NIRSpec requires a damped Lyman-$\alpha$ absorber with a column density of $\log (N_{\mathrm{HI}}/{\mathrm{cm}}^{-2})=21.96$. The total [O\,{\sc iii}]88$\mu$m luminosity (log$(L_{[\mathrm{OIII}]}/L_{\odot })=8.3\pm 0.1$) is fully consistent with the local $L_{[\mathrm{OIII}]}-SFR$ relation and indicating a gas-phase metallicity $>0.1{\mathrm{Z}}_{\odot }$. Using \texttt{prospector} SED modeling and combining the ALMA data with JWST observations, we find $Z=0.17{\mathrm{Z}}_{\odot }$ and a non-zero escape fraction of ionizing photons ($\sim 11\%$), which is necessary by the code to reproduce the UV spectrum. We measure an $[\mathrm{OIII}]5007$Å/[O III]88$\mu$m line flux ratio between 1 and 20, resulting in an upper limit to the electron density of roughly 700 cm${}^{-3}$ assuming a single-cloud photoionization model. The [OIIII]88$\mu$m emission line is spectrally resolved, with a FWHM of 100 km/s, resulting in a dynamical mass of log($M_{\mathrm{dyn}}/M_{\odot }$) = 9.0$\pm 0.2$. When compared to the stellar mass, this value represents a conservative upper limit on the gas mass fraction, which ranges from 50\% to 80\%, depending on the assumed star formation history. Past radiation-driven outflows may have cleared the galaxy from the gas, reducing the gas fraction and thus increasing the escape fraction of ionizing photons.

14 pages, 9 figure

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