Can Cosmological Simulations Reproduce the Spectroscopically Confirmed Galaxies Seen at z ≥ 10?

Abstract

Recent photometric detections of extreme ( z > 10) redshift galaxies from the JWST have been shown to be in strong tension with existing simulation models for galaxy formation and in the most acute case, in tension with ΛCDM itself. These results, however, all rest on the confirmation of these distances by spectroscopy. Recently, the JADES survey has detected the most distant galaxies with spectroscopically confirmed redshifts, with four galaxies found with redshifts between z = 10.38 and z = 13.2. In this Letter, we compare simulation predictions from four large cosmological volumes and two zoom-in protoclusters with the JADES observations to determine whether these spectroscopically confirmed galaxy detections are in tension with existing models for galaxy formation or with ΛCDM more broadly. We find that existing models for cosmological galaxy formation can generally reproduce the observations for JADES in terms of galaxy stellar masses, star formation rates, and the number density of galaxies at z > 10.

Keywords

• Astronomical simulations
• Hydrodynamical simulations
• Cosmology
• Galaxy formation
• Protogalaxies