The JWST-PRIMAL archival survey: A JWST/NIRSpec reference sample for the physical properties and Lyman-α absorption and emission of ∼600 galaxies at z = 5.0-13.4

Heintz, K. E.; Brammer, G. B.; Watson, D.; Oesch, P. A.; Keating, L. C.; Hayes, M. J.; Abdurro'Uf, Unknown; Arellano-Córdova, K. Z.; Carnall, A. C.; Christiansen, C. R.; Cullen, F.; Davé, R.; Dayal, P.; Ferrara, A.; Finlator, K.; Fynbo, J. P.U.; Flury, S. R.; Gelli, V.; Gillman, S.; Gottumukkala, R.; Gould, K.; Greve, T. R.; Hardin, S. E.; Hsiao, T. Y.Y.; Hutter, A.; Jakobsson, P.; Killi, M.; Khosravaninezhad, N.; Laursen, P.; Lee, M. M.; Magdis, G. E.; Matthee, Jorryt J; Naidu, R. P.; Narayanan, D.; Pollock, C.; Prescott, M. K.M.; Rusakov, V.; Shuntov, M.; Sneppen, A.; Smit, R.; Tanvir, N. R.; Terp, C.; Toft, S.; Valentino, F.; Vijayan, A. P.; Weaver, J. R.; Wise, J. H.; Witstok, J.

The JWST-PRIMAL archival survey: A JWST/NIRSpec reference sample for the physical properties and Lyman-α absorption and emission of ∼600 galaxies at z = 5.0-13.4

Heintz KE, Brammer GB, Watson D, Oesch PA, Keating LC, Hayes MJ, Abdurro’Uf U, Arellano-Córdova KZ, Carnall AC, Christiansen CR, Cullen F, Davé R, Dayal P, Ferrara A, Finlator K, Fynbo JPU, Flury SR, Gelli V, Gillman S, Gottumukkala R, Gould K, Greve TR, Hardin SE, Hsiao TYY, Hutter A, Jakobsson P, Killi M, Khosravaninezhad N, Laursen P, Lee MM, Magdis GE, Matthee JJ, Naidu RP, Narayanan D, Pollock C, Prescott MKM, Rusakov V, Shuntov M, Sneppen A, Smit R, Tanvir NR, Terp C, Toft S, Valentino F, Vijayan AP, Weaver JR, Wise JH, Witstok J. 2025. The JWST-PRIMAL archival survey: A JWST/NIRSpec reference sample for the physical properties and Lyman-α absorption and emission of ∼600 galaxies at z = 5.0-13.4. Astronomy and Astrophysics. 693, A60.

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DOI

10.1051/0004-6361/202450243

Journal Article | Published | English

Scopus indexed

Author

Heintz, K. E.; Brammer, G. B.; Watson, D.; Oesch, P. A.; Keating, L. C.; Hayes, M. J.; Abdurro'Uf, Unknown; Arellano-Córdova, K. Z.; Carnall, A. C.; Christiansen, C. R.; Cullen, F.; Davé, R.
All

Department

Matthee Group

Abstract

Context. One of the surprising early findings with JWST has been the discovery of a strong “roll-over” or a softening of the absorption edge of Lyα in a large number of galaxies at z ≳ 6, in addition to systematic offsets from photometric redshift estimates and fundamental galaxy scaling relations. This has been interpreted as strong cumulative damped Lyα absorption (DLA) wings from high column densities of neutral atomic hydrogen (H I), signifying major gas accretion events in the formation of these galaxies. Aims. To explore this new phenomenon systematically, we assembled the JWST/NIRSpec PRImordial gas Mass AssembLy (PRIMAL) legacy survey of 584 galaxies at z = 5.0 − 13.4, designed to study the physical properties and gas in and around galaxies during the reionization epoch. Methods. We characterized this benchmark sample in full and spectroscopically derived the galaxy redshifts, metallicities, star formation rates, and ultraviolet (UV) slopes. We defined a new diagnostic, the Lyα damping parameter DLyα, to measure and quantify the net effect of Lyα emission strength, the H I fraction in the intergalactic medium, or the local H I column density for each source. The JWST-PRIMAL survey is based on the spectroscopic DAWN JWST Archive (DJA-Spec). We describe DJA-Spec in this paper, detailing the reduction methods, the post-processing steps, and basic analysis tools. All the software, reduced spectra, and spectroscopically derived quantities and catalogs are made publicly available in dedicated repositories. Results. We find that the fraction of galaxies showing strong integrated DLAs with NHI > 1021 cm−2 only increases slightly from ≈60% at z ≈ 6 up to ≈65 − 90% at z > 8. Similarly, the prevalence and prominence of Lyα emission is found to increase with decreasing redshift, in qualitative agreement with previous observational results. Strong Lyα emitters (LAEs) are predominantly found to be associated with low-metallicity and UV faint galaxies. By contrast, strong DLAs are observed in galaxies with a variety of intrinsic physical properties, but predominantly at high redshifts and low metallicities. Conclusions. Our results indicate that strong DLAs likely reflect a particular early assembly phase of reionization-era galaxies, at which point they are largely dominated by pristine H I gas accretion. At z = 8 − 10, this gas gradually cools and forms into stars that ionize their local surroundings, forming large ionized bubbles and producing strong observed Lyα emission at z < 8.

Publishing Year

2025

Date Published

2025-01-06

Journal Title

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Publisher

EDP Sciences

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the referee for a detailed and constructive report, greatly improving the presentation of the results in this work. We would like to thank Peter Jakobsen for his vision and heroic endeavor in optimally designing the JWST/NIRSpec instrument and some of its first on-sky observations and for enlightening discussions about the intricacies of the NIRSpec data. Further, we would like to thank John Chisholm for helpful clarifications and discussions related to the escape fraction of ionizing photons and Aayush Saxena for enlightening conversations on the escape and absorption of Lyman-α photons. This work has received funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number MB22.00072. The Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN) is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under grant DNRF140. The data products presented herein were retrieved from the DAWN JWST Archive (DJA). DJA is an initiative of the Cosmic Dawn Center, which is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under grant DNRF140. P.D. acknowledge support from the NWO grant 016.VIDI.189.162 (“ODIN") and warmly thanks the European Commission’s and University of Groningen’s CO-FUND Rosalind Franklin program. Support from the ERC Advanced Grant INTERSTELLAR H2020/740120 is kindly acknowledged (A.F.). S.G. acknowledges financial support from the Villum Young Investigator grants 37440 and 13160 and the Cosmic Dawn Center. M.K. was supported by the ANID BASAL project FB210003. G.E.M. acknowledges financial support from the Villum Young Investigator grants 37440 and 13160 and the Cosmic Dawn Center. J.W. acknowledges support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), by the ERC through Advanced Grant 695671 “QUENCH”, by the UKRI Frontier Research grant RISEandFALL. Support for this work was provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51515.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. F.C. acknowledges support from a UKRI Frontier Research Guarantee Grant (PI Cullen; grant reference EP/X021025/1). J.H.W. acknowledges support by NSF grant AST-2108020 and NASA grants 80NSSC20K0520 and 80NSSC21K1053. NRT acknowledges support through STFC consolidated grant ST/W000857/1. M.J.H. is supported by the Swedish Research Council, VetenskapsrÅdet, and is fellow of the Knut & Alice Wallenberg foundation. This work is based in part on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. Software: This work made use of and acknowledge the following software: NumPy (Harris et al. 2020), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), LMfit (Newville et al. 2014), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020), grizli (Brammer 2023a), Astrodrizzle (Gonzaga et al. 2012), and MsaExp (v0.3; Brammer 2023b).

Volume

693

Article Number

A60

ISSN

0004-6361

eISSN

1432-0746

IST-REx-ID

18854

Cite this

Heintz KE, Brammer GB, Watson D, et al. The JWST-PRIMAL archival survey: A JWST/NIRSpec reference sample for the physical properties and Lyman-α absorption and emission of ∼600 galaxies at z = 5.0-13.4. Astronomy and Astrophysics. 2025;693. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202450243

Heintz, K. E., Brammer, G. B., Watson, D., Oesch, P. A., Keating, L. C., Hayes, M. J., … Witstok, J. (2025). The JWST-PRIMAL archival survey: A JWST/NIRSpec reference sample for the physical properties and Lyman-α absorption and emission of ∼600 galaxies at z = 5.0-13.4. Astronomy and Astrophysics. EDP Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450243

Heintz, K. E., G. B. Brammer, D. Watson, P. A. Oesch, L. C. Keating, M. J. Hayes, Unknown Abdurro’Uf, et al. “The JWST-PRIMAL Archival Survey: A JWST/NIRSpec Reference Sample for the Physical Properties and Lyman-α Absorption and Emission of ∼600 Galaxies at z = 5.0-13.4.” Astronomy and Astrophysics. EDP Sciences, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450243.

K. E. Heintz et al., “The JWST-PRIMAL archival survey: A JWST/NIRSpec reference sample for the physical properties and Lyman-α absorption and emission of ∼600 galaxies at z = 5.0-13.4,” Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 693. EDP Sciences, 2025.

Heintz, K. E., et al. “The JWST-PRIMAL Archival Survey: A JWST/NIRSpec Reference Sample for the Physical Properties and Lyman-α Absorption and Emission of ∼600 Galaxies at z = 5.0-13.4.” Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. 693, A60, EDP Sciences, 2025, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202450243.

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