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Efficient formation of a massive quiescent galaxy at redshift 4.9
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Efficient formation of a massive quiescent galaxy at redshift 4.9
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Journal Article
Efficient formation of a massive quiescent galaxy at redshift 4.9
2025
Overview
Within the established framework of structure formation, galaxies start as systems of low stellar mass and gradually grow into far more massive galaxies. The existence of massive galaxies in the first billion years of the Universe, as suggested by recent observations, seems to challenge this model, as such galaxies would require highly efficient conversion of baryons into stars. An even greater challenge in this epoch is the existence of massive galaxies that have already ceased forming stars. However, robust detections of early massive quiescent galaxies have been challenging due to the coarse wavelength sampling of photometric surveys. Here we report the spectroscopic confirmation with the James Webb Space Telescope of the quiescent galaxy RUBIES-EGS-QG-1 at redshift
z
= 4.90, 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Deep stellar absorption features in the spectrum reveal that the stellar mass of the galaxy of 10
11
M
⊙
formed in a short 200 Myr burst of star formation, after which star formation activity dropped rapidly and persistently. According to current galaxy formation models, systems with such rapid stellar mass growth and early quenching are too rare to plausibly occur in the small area probed spectroscopically with JWST. Instead, the discovery of RUBIES-EGS-QG-1 implies that early massive quiescent galaxies can be quenched earlier or exhaust gas available for star formation more efficiently than assumed at present.
RUBIES-EGS-QG-1 is an exceptionally massive and mature galaxy discovered just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Its stars formed in an extremely rapid burst, posing a major challenge to all current theoretical models.
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group
